Historical Urban Ecological Data, 1830-1930

Created for exploring and analyzing the urban health environments of 7 major United States cities - Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, Manhattan, and Philidelphia - from 1830 through 1930. The data for each city includes ward boundary changes, street networks, and ward-level data on disease, mortality, crime, and other variables reported by municipal departments. The HUE data set was produced for the "Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death" project, funded by the National Institute of Aging. This collection represents the GIS data for each of the 7 American cities, and in addition to ward boundary changes and street networks, includes in-street sewer and water sanitation systems coverage. All cities except Cincinnati include sanitation infrastructure data, and for Baltimore only water infrastructure is available. The city of Chicago includes supplemental GIS layers which reflect a reconstruction of two of Homer Hoyt's maps of average land value (1933 dollars) in the City of Chicago for 1873 and 1892. The square mile areas defined by Hoyt using Chicago's system of mile streets have been fit to the HUE street centerlines for Chicago. The Excel data tables include information about deaths in each ward broken down by cause of death, age, race, gender, as well as information about live births and deliveries.