Long read: The story of Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan's last working-class neighbourhood
Present-day Hell’s Kitchen, New York City
New York may be safer and more prosperous than ever before, but, as John Mackin discovers, the price for this is a Manhattan that is devoid of creativity and starved of character, even in the last great working class quarter of the island, Hell’s Kitchen.
“New York, New York: it’s a wonderful town; the Bronx is up and the Battery down…”
Wonderful? Nah! New York City is a magnificent. So what if it lacks the historical grandeur of Rome or the stylistic grace of Paris. Fuggedaboutit! As the subway guard coolly announces as the train pulls into the platform: “Times Square and 42nd Street: Crossroads of the World.” From Harlem in the far north to Chinatown in deep, downtown, and from Greenwich Village on the west side to The Bowery in the east, the Manhattan of our collective dreams is a city drawn from the movies: The Cotton Club, Crossing Delancey, After Hours, The Godfather, 42nd Street, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, Annie Hall, The Sweet Smell of Success, Bringing Out The Dead, The Apartment: each deposit us on the streets of these contrasting neighbourhoods; these often-adjacent, conspicuous enclaves of cultural identity.
It’s the very diversity of the neighbourhoods of Manhattan that, like a patchwork quilt, give the city its colour, its chiaroscuro, and to outsiders its very identity. Or at least they did.
You want to chase down a bookie’s runner and grab some meatballs with spaghetti: then head for Lafayette Street in Little Italy. You want sausage and sauerkraut? Then take the 6 train up to Yorkville on the Upper East Side, knock twice and ask for Gerd. Fortune Cookies and Chop Suey, or a $10 Gucci handbag? Then it’s the inscrutable warren of noodle houses round Mulberry and Canal Streets. If you can handle the schlep uptown then it’s jazz, soul food and the brotherhood of Farrakhan up across 110th Street, deep in Harlem. And at all stops in between there’s a Little Korea or a Little India, The Bronx, 42nd Street and Broadway. Emerging onto the pavement from each subsequent subway station is like arriving in a new country, or at least a new city.
Well, it used to be like that.
Hell’s Kitchen shoe-shine, 1970s
“It’s the very diversity of the neighbourhoods of Manhattan that, like a patchwork quilt, give the city its colour”
If it still is, in any way, then it’s due to the diligence of local entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the busloads of tourists keen to experience the New York of their own celluloid dreams. Some would say they’re 30 years too late. Romantics would have you believe that when New York began its climb out of the social and economic turbulence of the 1970s it began to lose its soul. These are usually the kind of people who’d rhapsodise about the slum neighbourhoods but never had to live in one. People like me. I miss the old New York - the real New York. And I never went there. Today’s Big Apple is a city of steel and glass spires, glistening in the sunshine. Pavements are clean, the police friendly, and there’s a Starbucks on almost every corner. Everyone wears neat sneakers and has teeth like Jerry Seinfeld. You can even use the subway after dark. The Guardian Angels have all gone home and Travis Bickle has been sectioned. In the 21st Century, you feel more at risk during kicking-out time in the English shires than in New York City; and who’s the city’s guiding light
and social ringmaster? Donald Trump. Enough said.
The Rotten Apple of the ’70s, the malodorous citadel of power cuts and garbage strikes, of fiscal deficits, spiralling murder rates, rampant heroin addiction and vacant lots may have been the nadir for the city economically, but it gave birth to The Ramones, Kojak and Studio 54. You could still score crack on the pavements of Times Square outside the porno cinemas, and ordinary working folk could still afford to live in the brownstones, sitting on the stoop in their vests on a summer’s evening, watching the kids using fire hydrants as water cannons during asphalt-melting heatwaves. The City of Dreams. Who loves ya, baby?
The neighbourhoods are still there, but they’re cleaner, they’re safer and they’re… well, they’re upmarket, almost-deliberate pastiches of what they once were, effortlessly. Coach parties disgorge tourists onto the Harlem pavements at Sylvia’s for a Harlem Soul Food Experience: chicken and grits, biscuits and gravy, accompanied by – admittedly very accomplished – Gospel singing. But it’s all too contrived. What’s a celebration of culture to some, is cynical to others. It’s a theme park, as naff as a British medieval banquet with jesters and busty serving wenches. It’s both self-reverential and self-referencing but most damningly, it’s New York playing to the gallery; New York pandering to the tourists. And that’s the nub of the issue – it is definitely not the New York way.
“You could still score crack on the pavements of Times Square outside the porno cinemas, and ordinary working folk could still afford to live in the brownstones”
A recently arrived Chinese immigrant wouldn’t dream of eating in Chinatown with the out-of-town rubes or if he did he’d order off-menu. And that family from Ohio sitting behind him would never guess that a snake was being strangled in the kitchen to cater for his authentic rural Cantonese tastes. This is Disneyland Chinatown. Real Chinese food is more readily available in the outer borough of Queens – with not a spring roll or sweet and sour sauce in sight. It’s also where those Chinatown waiters will be living. As the waiters, the chefs, the shop girls, bar-tenders and bus drivers head home to Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx each night, the city changes from a working blue- and white-collar metropolis into a Vegas-style pastiche. Manhattan is being abandoned to the tourists and to the wealthy professionals who in times past fled the grime and the noise for the sea breezes of Long Island and the leafy Hudson Valley ’burbs. I blame programmes like Sex in The City and Friends myself. The net effect is that real people just can’t afford to live here any more, as New Yorker Justin Sharon, born and brought up in Harlem, explains.
“There’s definitely a feeling that things ain’t what they used to be in the Big Apple. Ironically, it was an Italian, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who broke the back of the Mafia. And Times Square (or ‘New Times Square’ as it’s now known) has been Disneyfied to death, nothing like the old seedy Midnight Cowboy days. Bill Clinton now keeps an office in Harlem and there’s the incredibly expensive upscale grocery store Whole Foods (mockingly called ‘Whole Paycheck’) in the Bowery, which was the infamously poor immigrant Skid Row of yore. The Meatpacking District, on the far west side of downtown, which used to be a no-go zone, home to trannies and drug dealers is like Miami with the nightclubs.”
Hell’s Kitchen, 1970s
“Hell’s Kitchen may very well be the last authentic neighbourhood left in Manhattan. But hurry, as it’s disappearing as fast as the Greenland ice cap”
Hell’s Kitchen may very well be the last authentic neighbourhood left in Manhattan. But hurry, as it’s disappearing as fast as the Greenland ice cap. In 10 years it may all be gone and you’ll be standing in a puddle outside Foot Locker. Hell’s Kitchen is the area of midtown Manhattan between 34th and 59th Street, west of 8th Avenue. That’s roughly from the south end of Central Park at Columbus Circle down to Madison Square Garden and over past 12th Ave (the West Side Highway) to the Hudson piers where the immigrants poured off the boats and into this neighbourhood in the 19th Century. And it’s this that gave the area its distinctive edge – it was always a rough and tumble place, where a readiness to use your fists was essential in order to survive.
In the city’s burgeoning years it was predominantly a first generation Irish and Italian ghetto, characterised by the tenement slums, poverty and vicious street warfare as rival criminal gangs fought for control of the streets. It’s the neighbourhood that the young immigrant Vito Corleone made his home and cut his criminal teeth in Godfather II and where the Sharks and Jets clashed in West Side Story. It’s the urban nightmare of Bringing Out The Dead; pitch-black canyons of crack-infested tenements and sleaze wherein Scorcese created a dystopian urban hell as painted by Goya. And yet a few years later, a few short blocks east of here, there’s a Disney Megastore on 42nd Street. The rain that Travis Bickle hoped would one day wash all the scum from the sidewalk did indeed come: but it was the property developers that cleaned up the streets, not crazed vigilantes.
Map showing Hell’s Kitchen situated in the north-west of Manhattan Island
But before the purge began, the tenements and piers, the factories and bars, the cheek-by-jowl association of hard labour and hard living made Hell’s Kitchen the ‘Noo Yoik’ of myth and legend. It was the backdrop imagined by a thousand art-directors and comic-book illustrators. The Irish colonised the area in the late 19th Century, ousting the Afro-Americans, and set to work making the Hudson piers their own. There was money to be made in these docklands, and where there was money there was soon a thriving underworld. In the early 1900s, impoverished Italians from the Mafia-infested southern peninsula also landed here. No strangers themselves to grinding out a living in grim circumstances, they soon banded together to look after their own, much as the Irish had done half a century earlier.
There began a 50-year battle for control of the streets. The mix was explosively shaken up with the arrival of Puerto Ricans in the 1950s. The struggle became so renowned that it found worldwide fame just a few blocks away on Broadway in Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s 1957 musical. The film version of West Side Story was filmed in 1961 around 65th and 69th Street, between Amsterdam and West End Avenue, just to the north of Hell’s Kitchen. As they filmed, the area around them was already undergoing demolition in readiness for the new Lincoln Centre for The Performing Arts. The neighbourhood’s mean streets were replaced by an ultra-modern opera house. And so it began.
Hell’s Kitchen, 1970s
“The rain that Travis Bickle hoped would one day wash all the scum from the sidewalk did indeed come: but it was the property developers that cleaned up the streets, not crazed vigilantes”
Redevelopment meant construction. And construction meant big bucks for the organised crime gangs. The mob-related terror reached its peak in the 1970s and ’80s when Hell’s Kitchen became the city in microcosm: squalid, dangerous and corrupt, yet visceral and alive with possibility. If you could wield a gun or a guitar to effect then you had a chance. The gangs chose the gun. The neighbourhood was the traditional home of The Westies, a tightly-knit and ultra-violent Irish-American gang. The construction of the Jacob Javits Convention centre on 11th Ave, between 34th and 38th Streets saw increasing interest from the Genovese Italian-American mob, despite the project being on the west side and under the Westie control of boss Mickey Spillane – respected as a traditional ‘Godfather’ figure in the community.
However, leading Gambino mobster Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno conspired with one of Spillane’s trusted underlings, Jimmy Coonan: if Spillane could be replaced by Coonan, then the Gambinos would move in and run the site, giving Coonan a generous ‘taste’ of the proceeds. Coonan hired an ‘associate’ of the Genovese to eliminate Spillane’s captains in Hell’s Kitchen. With his West Side supporters dead, Spillane – who no longer lived in the area – was effectively ousted. Coonan went on to request that Roy DeMeo, a Gambino soldier, murder Spillane. This gave Coonan and the Gambino’s undisputed control over the new construction rackets during the building of the Convention Centre, Madison Square Garden and the Colisseum. This move into construction was deemed vital due to the long-term decline of the docks and the traditional sources of revenue. The demographic of Hell’s Kitchen was slowly but inevitably changing, and as the working-class Irish Americans left the neighbourhood in the ’80s and ’90s, so the Westies’ influence waned. After numerous convictions in the 1980s they continued on a smaller scale as contract murderers for the Gambinos, until John Gotti’s conviction in 1992.
The displacement of the century-old Irish community was hastened by other factors. The Ninth Avenue Elevated train, which had blocked out the sunshine since the 1890s, as well as filling the air with cinders, sparks and smoke (as graphic a metaphor for Hell if there ever was one) was dismantled in the 1940s. Suddenly, the air was breathable again, the streets almost pleasant to walk in. The ‘El’ had blackened the environment to such an extent that for decades new buildings on 9th Ave had their main entrances built on the side, street-facing elevations rather than their Avenue frontage. The proximity to the Theatre District also hastened the decline of the traditional blue-collar neighbourhood. Method-acting guru Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio on West 44th St drew an artistic crowd into the area, attracted by low-rents and the short walk to Broadway’s theatres and studios. Ninth Avenue was also becoming renowned for the diversity of its food culture and in 1974 inaugurated an annual International Food Festival. Meanwhile, West 46th Street was becoming ‘Restaurant Row’ to service the hospitality and dining needs of nearby Broadway.
“The mob-related terror reached its peak in the 1970s and ’80s when Hell’s Kitchen became the city in microcosm: squalid, dangerous and corrupt, yet visceral and alive with possibility”
The image of the area was changing. Residents became keen to boost the area’s prestige, and with developers looking to promote their investments, they campaigned for a more respectable identity for the neighbourhood. As the old blue-collar streets were squeezed by uber-hip Chelsea in the south, and the genteel Upper East Side to the north, and with the Midtown Theatre District edging more and more to the west, Hell’s Kitchen was contracting, almost turning back in on itself towards the Hudson River. Money men in the real estate industry, meanwhile, were busily marketing their new opportunities as being in ‘Midtown West’ or more commonly, ‘Clinton’, after former mayor DeWitt Clinton.
Writer, broadcaster and long-term Manhattan resident Anthony Bourdain lamented the disappearance of Hell’s Kitchen in the Disappearing Manhattan TV programme: “I honestly thought that Hell’s Kitchen would be the last neighbourhood to go… but it’s going,” he said. At the closure of the infamous Holland Bar (Est. 1927) on 9th Ave at 39th, squeezed out by greedy landlords, he says, “It’s the end of the world as we know it – the last dive bar in New York City… Where am I gonna drink now? When a place like this disappears – what does that say about our society? Old family-owned and -run businesses like Manganaro’s Grosseria Italiana, in the same family since 1893, only survive because they own the building.”
Hell’s Kitchen, 1970s
“We’re losing, in the centre of this city, the working class neighbourhoods”
Other long-established neighbourhood bars and businesses are likewise falling victim to the incessant demand for property, stoked by a real-estate feeding frenzy. A startling indication of how hot the area has become came in 2004 when the old Howard Johnson Motel on 52nd and 8th Avenue was sold for $9m. A mere two months later, the plot was sold on for an incredible $43m to a property company.
Meanwhile, old family-run businesses are closing and moving to more rent-friendly neighbourhoods, often in the outer boroughs. Those that remain are looking more and more isolated, islands of tradition stranded next to franchised coffee-shops and chain fashion outlets, victims of rocketing rents, the symptom of the inexorable gentrification. “We’re losing, in the centre of this city, the working class neighbourhoods. And it’s important that everyone has a place,” said Bourdain. “They’ve taken the Hell out of Hell’s Kitchen.”
Images courtesy of PD Pictures and Wikimedia Commons.