There is growing recognition that neighborhood context contributes to the health and well-being of residents over and above individual characteristics and health behaviors. However, few published reports exist of methods for documenting neighborhood characteristics which are easily administered with minimal outlay of resources. In this paper, we present the development of a brief observational method for urban neighborhoods relevant to the health and well-being of families and children. Data from a socieconomically diverse group of urban neighborhoods are used to create theoretically grounded measures of neighborhood context, and the utility of these measures for discriminating between and within urban neighborhoods is demonstrated.