Crowded Streets

The maps and pictures and diagrams of the neighborhood surrounding Hull House make one thing very apparent, the streets were very crowded. House was built next to house, block after block, seemingly as far as the eye could see.

Not only were the streets crowded in terms of buildings they were also crowded in the sense that a magnitude of diverse people inhabited that area. From the ethnicity maps its apparent that the Hull House neighborhood was as ethnically diverse as you could see. Italians, Greeks, Russians, Persians, any nationality that you could think of was represented. For the most part the ethnicities were evenly spaced out. When looking at the maps you can see blocks of this ethnicity and that, but between these blocks there is no separation or buffer.

The most interesting diagrams for me were the ones that looked at the wage make up of the Hull House neighborhood. I would have thought that those with high wages would live far away from those with the lowest wages. Instead the wages seem to be very evenly spaced out. The color map shows a rainbow of colors on each block representing the different wage groups. This calls to mind a conversation I had with my older brother after he had been living in Costa Rica. He told me that big cities are different from big cities here because there seems to be no real separation of rich and poor. He told me that on any given street there would be expensive high rises and run down shanties. Possibly this fusion of rich and poor is the trait of a place that is still in its development stage.