Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood covers 3½-square-miles stretching from Cermak Road at its northern border to 60th street to the south and from Lake Michigan to the Dan Ryan Expressway.
Bronzeville is just little over a mile wide. This limited space where blacks could live due to restrictive housing covenants gave it the nicknames of “Black Belt” and “Black Metropolis.” At its peak in the 1920s more than 300,000 lived in the narrow strip, but today its population stands at less than one-quarter of that.
During it's heyday from the 1900s through the 1950s, Bronzeville was a center for African-American culture that rivaled Harlem for its politics, business district, music and dance.