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[qopyqat]

Hi all
I am from New York City, Times Square to be exact. Been here for a better part of my life and can't imagine being anywhere else. I live in an area called Hell's Kitchen, which has it's own reputation

NEW YORK is a walking city. People walk everywhere: to work, to school, to shop, to worship. And usually we’re in such a hurry, with the whole city rushing headlong around us, that we can miss what we’re walking past.

It’s the past itself — fragments and layers of New York’s history unceremoniously preserved in its streetscapes, in stories told on park benches and bar stools, in ghosts glimpsed in shadowed doorways. Hell’s Kitchen is one such neighborhood. Walking it with a longtime denizen offers a chance to bring alive some of that history.

Several legends compete to explain how Hell’s Kitchen got its name, but there’s no dispute about why. From the mid-1800s into the 1980s, this Midtown area, from 34th Street to 59th Street between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, was one tough neighborhood. Though it’s now known by many for its Off Broadway theaters, chic restaurants and luxury condominium towers (and as the name of a reality TV show), Hell’s Kitchen has a history that’s rich with gangsters and ghosts, streetwalkers and speakeasies, mysterious disappearances and gruesome murders.

“It isn’t Hell’s Kitchen anymore, it’s Hell’s Canyon,” Todd Robbins recently remarked, standing on the corner of West 39th Street and squinting up Eighth Avenue at the skyscrapers. As he led me around the neighborhood, he said that he rarely used the more genteel name, Clinton, first proposed in the 1960s. To him the older name better suits an area he fondly described as a place of “diamonds on top of a dung heap.”

Mr. Robbins has lived in the same one-bedroom apartment in a Ninth Avenue tenement since he moved there from Southern California 26 years ago. He could fairly claim to be holding up the neighborhood’s reputation for colorful characters: he eats lightbulbs and swallows swords for a living, is dean of the Coney Island Sideshow School, and ambles through Hell’s Kitchen wearing a straw boater and high-button shoes.

As we strolled west along busy, noisy 39th Street, from Eighth Avenue toward the waterfront, it was hard to imagine that the area was once green meadows that the Dutch settlers called Bloemendael (later anglicized as Bloomingdale), the Vale of Flowers.

African-American workers completing the Croton Aqueduct lived here in the 1840s. They were followed in the 1850s by a surge of Irish and German immigrants, who worked on the Hudson River docks and in the area’s slaughterhouses, factories and lumberyards, and for the Hudson River Railroad, later the New York Central, whose tracks ran down 10th and 11th Avenues.

Some worked as West Side cowboys, riding horses ahead of the trains, waving lanterns or red flags to shoo off pedestrians, horse carriages and later automobiles. Still, there were enough accidents that 11th Avenue came to be known as Death Avenue before the tracks were moved in the 1930s.

Tenements to house the workers and their families were hastily thrown up from the 1850s on, and out of them roamed gangs of youths who ruled the streets after the Civil War. The Hell’s Kitchen Gang, whom Herbert Asbury called “a collection of the most desperate ruffians in the city” in his 1927 book “The Gangs of New York” (inspiration for the Martin Scorsese film), fought constantly with the police and with rivals like the Gorillas, the Parlor Mob, and the Gophers. Members had names like Stumpy Malarkey, Goo Goo Knox, Happy Jack Mulraney, and One Lung Curran, who, when his girlfriend complained of the cold, walked out to the street, “blackjacked the first policeman he encountered,” according to Asbury, and stole his coat.



The block of West 39th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues saw so much fighting it was nicknamed Battle Row. In 1881 an article in The New York Times referred to a particularly scurrilous tenement on the block as Hell’s Kitchen, its first known use in print. Today those tenements are gone; the street lies between auto body shops and a Lincoln Tunnel ramp.

Many blocks of tenements were razed during the tunnel’s construction in the 1930s and expansion in the ’40s and ’50s. Yet examples still dot the neighborhood. Mr. Robbins’s block, on the east side of Ninth Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets, is an almost intact row.

During Prohibition it was said there were more speakeasies than children in the Irish Catholic area. On Restaurant Row (West 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues) the long-popular Barbetta is one of the establishments in former speakeasy locations. (Danny’s Grand Sea Palace, now, sadly, closed, was another.) The speakeasies were run by gangsters like the dapper Owney (the Killer) Madden, who held the controlling interest in the Cotton Club in Harlem and consorted with the notorious Mafia boss Lucky Luciano.


The Weekend Explorer column on Friday about the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood referred incorrectly to the status of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, on West 46th Street. Though it houses a theater, the building continues to serve as a church; it is not a former church.

I look forward to meeting the people here. This is one of the most beautiful pages I've seen in a long time.
All my best
QQ

[Dragon Slayer]

Welcome qopyqat. Look around and join in. Love New York.

[Kiss Of Death]

Welcome to aboard qopyqat.