How Much Was the Rent on Your Apartment in 1943?

All that orange and pink stands for rents between $50 and $99 per month–one of the more expensive areas for rentals in Brooklyn in the 1940s–as shown in this awesome new interactive map created by the Center for Urban Research at CUNY’s Graduate Research Center. Welcome to 1940s New York uses info from a New York City Market Analysis, which was complied in 1943 by four local newspapers.

Adjusted for inflation, those rents in the orange and pink today would be roughly between $668 and $1,322.

You can click each neighborhood on the map to get more information from the original analysis, including a few photos of the place at the time. Check out the one for Flatbush to see pics like the one above, and a photo of a bustling Church Avenue, plus a page that breaks down the price of rents and annual expenditures for families. Additionally, the Flatbush analysis notes:

There are more chains and super-markets here than in any other Brooklyn district.

It also notes that the population of 151,403 was larger than the population of the city of Springfield, MA! But not too much of a change since then–as of the 2007/2009 American Community Survey, the population of Community District 14 (which has slightly different borders than the 1943 analysis) was 164,693 (still slightly larger than Springfield).