I was looking at the Regenstein’s fascinating collection of Census 2000 maps again and noticed this: my census tract is in a cluster of tracts notable for its singular lack of children.

Just how singular? The “urban, very well off; numerous young, unmarried adults and hardly any children” cluster scores “nearly 4 standard deviations above the mean” for non-family households. Four standard deviations = 32/1,000,000 = 99.9968 percentile. Wow.

One recent addition from the Map Collection: scanned Social Science Research Committee maps from the 1920s and 1930s. The ethnic origin maps show ethnic areas that are mere shadows; the population density has shifted around quite a bit–Little Village and the north lakefront are denser, but the rest of the city is much less dense. (The Black Belt was among the most crowded parts of town; now the heart of Bronzeville has a suburban-level population density of