Last year, as voters were gearing up to choose their candidates for Chicago mayor and city council in the 2023 municipal election,

Chicagoan and curious citizen Taylor Moore was looking at the city's ward map.

I'm a nerd. I'm really interested in the shapes of maps and weird shapes that come out on map.

And in exploring the ward map, the self-proclaimed nerd noticed something peculiar,

something she hadn't seen before in her eight years living in Chicago.

She noticed a rectangle cutout in the middle of the 19th ward.

Taylor asked Curious City, what is this hole? And why does it

exist? I'd never seen that before. It was so strange to me. If the rectangle wasn't part of

the 19th Ward or part of Chicago, what could it possibly be? I figured there must be some sort of

story behind it. The 19th Ward is in the far southwest corner of the city, bordering the suburbs of Evergreen Park, Oakland, and Blue Island.

And of course, the ward map isn't a collection of perfect, pretty shapes.

It's a hodgepodge of zigzags and swerves carved out over decades to benefit the politicians who want to keep

getting elected to their local council seat, a practice known as gerrymandering.

There are some towns on the northwest side that were never annexed to the city and are

surrounded by city land. But look closely and you'll see the hole in the 19th Ward is perhaps the largest,

inexplicable cutout in all of Chicago's 50 wards.

As a freelance journalist, Taylor has done her fair share of stories on Chicago politics.

So she had her suspicions.

You know, Chicago has a long history of corruption and even longer history of, you know, wheeling and dealing when it comes to voting.

She wondered, could the area have been carved out of the ward because the local alderman didn't like the constituents there?

But the area carved out of the 19th ward, it's actually just a cemetery. And even in Chicago,

dead people cannot vote. So what would be the benefit of keeping Mount Greenwood Cemetery out of a ward?

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