Community Geography

Lincoln High School Report on the History of Vice in Old Town

Students from Lincoln High School are working on finding trends in data concerning the subject of vice for the Old Town History Project. The focus has been directed toward the location of vice and the neighborhood demographics over time. Combining data collected from maps produced in the 1913 Report of the Portland Vice Commission to original arrest records, Sanborn Maps, census data and city reverse directories, it is hoped that a more light can be shed on the historical vice activity in Old Town and how that activity effected the neighborhood as a whole.

Below are two examples of maps completed by the students. The first is the result of registering a scan of the original Vice Report Map of 1913 to current geography. Below that, point data abstracted from the original vice map is overlain on historical Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. This gave a sense of the distribution of vice activities in relation to landuses and property ownership.