1931 A Map of Chicago’s Gangland from Authentic Sources...

One of the most infamous and sought-after pictorial maps ever produced, The Gangland Map of Chicago captures the city’s violent, sensational, and darkly humorous Prohibition-era identity. Published in 1931, it offers a satirical panorama of Chicago’s criminal landscape at the height of organized crime, when Al Capone’s empire dominated headlines and the nation’s fascination with bootlegging, gang warfare, and vice made the city both notorious and iconic. A City of Crime and Comic Chaos Rendered in bold colors and a comic-strip style, the map transforms Chicago into a cartoonish battleground of corruption and crime. Districts are renamed with sardonic flair such as “Capone Territory,” “Little Sicily,” “Cicero,” and “Stickney,” while vignettes illustrate shootouts, car chases, gambling dens, and whiskey smuggling. A pistol-shaped compass rose “fires” northward, and the distance scale is measured not in miles, but in “shootings,” “murders,” and “massacres.” Prominently displayed in the up