A century of New Yorkers, mapped dot by dot

For immediate release

New interactive map shows where every New York neighborhood came from, census by census since 1910

New York and Tallinn — Where New York Came From, launched at nyc.valevlaube.com, lets anyone watch a century of New York City immigration and migration unfold block by block. Built from historical census tract data, the map places one dot for every 25 New Yorkers in the neighborhood where they were counted and colors it by where their family came from: Italian, Irish, German, Russian and Eastern European, Nordic and Baltic, Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American, Asian, African American and more.

Drag the timeline and the city rearranges itself. The Lower East Side of 1910 holds half a million people in a few square kilometers. Harlem becomes the capital of Black America within twenty years. Italian Harlem turns into El Barrio, Little Norway gives way to Brooklyn's Chinatown, and Flushing becomes one of the largest Chinatowns in the country. Visitors can pick a single ancestry, from Norwegian to Dominican to Estonian, and follow it across the decades, or search any neighborhood for its own century in one chart.

Beyond origins, the map shows how crowded the city was, who was born abroad, which languages were spoken at home (including the Yiddish map of 1970), what families paid in rent and earned, who owned their home, and the federal "redlining" maps of 1938, whose grades still line up with homeownership today. Ten guided stories, illustrated with archive photographs from the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the National Archives, walk through Harlem, the Lower East Side, Jewish New York, El Barrio, Little Odessa, the three Chinatowns, Brooklyn's Nordic waterfront, and the city's Finnish, Lithuanian and Estonian communities.

"New York is usually told as a story of famous neighborhoods, but the census lets you see every block, every decade," said Valev Laube, who built the project. "I came to the United States as an immigrant myself and made New York my home. I wanted something where anyone can find the street their grandparents arrived on and watch who came after them."

The map is free, has no advertising and works in English and Estonian on desktop and mobile. It is based on census data from IPUMS NHGIS at the University of Minnesota and on Mapping Inequality from the University of Richmond.

About Valev Laube. Valev Laube is a designer and technologist based between New York and Tallinn, founder of The VL Studios and editor of The Northern Voices, a publication about Nordic and Baltic communities in North America. Where New York Came From is part of his Lab series of free interactive projects at valevlaube.com/lab.

Contact: Valev Laube · [email protected] · valevlaube.com