1931 A Map of Chicago’s Gangland from Authentic Sources...
DESCRIPTION
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 upper right corner is a macabre depiction of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, one of the most infamous events of the Prohibition era. This grisly episode, in which seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang were executed in a North Side garage by men dressed as police officers, became a defining moment in the mythology of organized crime and is immortalized here as a visual centerpiece of Chicago’s violent legend.
Satire, Morality, and Mock Education
A striking feature in the upper left corner is the “Gangland Dictionary,” a humorous glossary defining underworld slang and criminal euphemisms, from “Chicago Typewriter” (a Tommy gun) to “Taking a Ride” (a mob hit). These tongue-in-cheek definitions reinforce the map’s dual character as both an educational parody and a gleeful celebration of the city’s infamy. The title itself boasts that the map was “Designed to Inculcate the Most Important Principles of Piety and Virtue in Young Persons and Graphically Portray the Evils and Sin of Large Cities,” though every inch of its design revels in mischief, irony, and fascination with the forbidden.
Even Lake Michigan plays a role in this criminal ecosystem, labeled with bootlegging aircraft such as the “Canadian Special,” which ferried illegal liquor from Canada across the Great Lakes. Around the city’s margins, a border of rhyming text reads like a satirical nursery rhyme: “Sing a Song of Gangsters, Pockets Full of Dough, Four and Twenty Bottles, Make a Case You Know,” further blurring the line between moral lesson and comic entertainment.
Suppression and Survival
Despite its humor, the map was viewed as a civic embarrassment. Published just two years before the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair, city leaders feared it would undermine efforts to rebrand Chicago as a center of innovation and industry. Under orders from Mayor Anton J. Cermak, the majority of printed copies were confiscated and destroyed. Only a few escaped destruction, and today fewer than ten examples are known to survive, making it one of the rarest and most desirable pictorial maps of the 20th century.
More than a novelty, The Gangland Map of Chicago is a vivid artifact of the city’s mythology, a snapshot of America’s obsession with crime, media sensationalism, and moral hypocrisy. It stands as both satire and social commentary, immortalizing Chicago’s underworld with a wink, a smirk, and a trigger finger.
CONDITION
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