Mapping Pre-Prohibition Alcohol in Brookyln

King’s County Distillery, established in 2010, claims to be the “oldest whiskey distillery in Brooklyn” because of how lasting the effects of prohibition were on alcohol production in this borough. We were interested in knowing which Brooklyn neighborhoods felt the effects of prohibition most. As our data source in this investigation, we used publicly available digitized Brooklyn city directories found on Internet Archive. By using Python to read and parse this directory, then importing the results into Google My Maps, we mapped the distilleries and breweries and residences of brewers and distillers in Brooklyn in 1869, 1903 and 1912, visualizing areas of production prior to Prohibition..