6/23/13 Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan Coordinates: 40.763186°N 73.994508°W From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Hell's Kitchen, also known as Clinton and Midtown West, is a neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City between 34th Street and 59th Street, from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River.[1] The area provides transportation, hospital and warehouse infrastructure support to the Midtown Manhattan business district. Its gritty reputation kept real estate prices below those of most other areas of Manhattan until the early 1990s; rents have increased dramatically since and are currently above the Manhattan average.[2] Once a bastion of poor and working-class Irish Americans, Hell's View from between 47th and 48th Kitchen's proximity to Midtown has changed it over the last three streets on Ninth Avenue looking decades of the 20th century and into the new millennium. The 1969 northeast toward Time Warner Center edition of the City Planning Commission's Plan for New York City and Hearst Tower reported that development pressures related to its Midtown location were driving people of modest means from the area. Today, the area is gentrifying. The rough-and-tumble days on the West Side figure prominently in Damon Runyon's stories and the childhood home of Marvel Comics' Daredevil. Being near to both Broadway theatres and Actors Studio training school the area has long been a home to actors learning and practicing their craft. Contents 1 Geography 2 Name 2.1 Alternative names 3 History 3.1 Ethnic conflict 3.2 Special Clinton district 3.3 Windermere 3.4 September 11, 2001 3.5 Boom times 4 Actor and artist neighborhood 5 Transportation 6 Food 7 Parks 8 Education 9 Hell's Kitchen in popular culture 10 Notable current and former residents 10.1 Hell's Kitchen mobsters 11 References en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Kitchen,_Manhattan 1/15 6/23/13 Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 12 External links Geography "Hell's Kitchen" generally refers to the area from 34th to 59th streets. Starting west of Eighth Avenue, city zoning regulations generally limit buildings to 6 stories. As a result, most of the buildings are older, often walk-ups. For the most part, the neighborhood encompasses the ZIP codes 10019 and 10036. The post office for 10019 is called Radio City Station, the original name for Rockefeller Center on Sixth Avenue. Southern boundary Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea overlap and are often lumped together as the "West Side" since they support the Midtown Manhattan business district. The traditional dividing line is 34th Street. The New York Passenger Ship Terminal transition area just north of Madison Square Garden and in Hell's Kitchen at 52nd Street Pennsylvania Station includes the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Eastern boundary The neighborhood overlaps the Times Square Theater District to the east at Eighth Avenue. On its southeast border, it overlaps the Garment District also on Eighth Avenue. Here, two landmarks reside – the New Yorker Hotel and the dynamic Manhattan Center building (at the northwest corner of 34th Street and Eighth Avenue). Included in the transition area on Eighth Avenue are the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street, the Pride of Manhattan Fire Station (from which 15 firefighters died at the World Trade Center), several theatres including Studio 54, the original soup stand of Seinfeld's "The Soup Nazi," and the Hearst Tower. Northern boundary The neighborhood edges toward the southern boundary of the Upper West Side, and 57th Street is considered by some the traditional northern boundary. However the neighborhood often is considered to extend to 59th Street (the southern edge of Central Park starting at Eighth Avenue) where the avenue names change. Included in the 57th to 59th Street transition area are the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where John Lennon died in 1980 after being shot, and John Jay College. Western boundary The western boundary is the Hudson River. Name Several explanations exist for the original name. An early use of the phrase appears in a comment Davy Crockett made about another notorious Irish slum in Manhattan, Five Points. According to the Irish Cultural Society of the Garden City Area: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Kitchen,_Manhattan 2/15 6/23/13 Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia When, in 1835, Davy Crockett said, "In my part of the country, when you meet an Irishman, you find a first-rate gentleman; but these are worse than savages; they are too mean to swab hell's kitchen." He was referring to the Five Points.[3] According to an article by Kirkley Greenwell, published online by the Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association: No one can pin down the exact origin of the label, but some refer to a tenement on 54th Street as the first "Hell's Kitchen." Another explanation points to an infamous building at 39th as the true original. A gang and a local dive took the name as well.... a similar slum also existed in London and was known as Hell's Kitchen.[4] Local historian Mary Clark explained the name thus: ...first appeared in print on September 22, 1881 when a New York Times reporter went to the West 30s with a police guide to get details of a multiple murder there. He referred to a particularly Hell's Kitchen gear for sale in the infamous tenement at 39th Street and 10th Avenue as "Hell's Video Cafe on Ninth Avenue Kitchen," and said that the entire section was "probably the lowest and filthiest in the city." According to this version, 39th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues became known as Hell's Kitchen and the name was later expanded to the surrounding streets. Another version ascribes the name's origins to a German restaurant in the area known as Heil's Kitchen, after its proprietors. But the most common version traces it to the story of Dutch Fred The Cop, a veteran policeman, who with his rookie partner, was watching a small riot on West 39th Street near 10th Avenue. The rookie is supposed to have said, "This place is hell itself," to which Fred replied, "Hell's a mild climate. This is Hell's Kitchen."[5] Alternative names Hell's Kitchen has stuck as the general and informal name of the neighborhood even though real estate developers have offered alternatives of "Clinton" and "Midtown West" or even "the Mid-West". The Clinton name, used by the municipality of New York City, originated in 1959 in an attempt to link the area to DeWitt Clinton Park at 52nd and Eleventh Avenue, named after the 19th century New York governor. History On the island of Manhattan as it was when Europeans first saw it, the Public housing Great Kill which formed from three small streams that united near Tenth Avenue and 40th Street, wound through the low-lying Reed Valley renowned for fish and waterfowl[6] to empty into the Hudson River at a deep bay on the river at the present 42nd Street.[7] The name was retained in a tiny hamlet, Great Kill, that became a center for carriage-making, as the upland to the south and east became known as Longacre, the predecessor of Longacre, now Times Square.[8] One of the large farms of the colonial era in this neighborhood was that of Andreas Hopper and his descendants; it spanned the distance between today's 48th Street nearly to 59th Street and stretched from the river east to what is now Sixth Avenue. One of the Hopper farmhouses, built in 1752 for John Hopper the younger, stood near 53rd Street and Eleventh Avenue; christened en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Kitchen,_Manhattan 3/15 6/23/13 Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Rosevale" for its extensive gardens, it was the home of the War of 1812 veteran, Gen. Garrit Hopper Striker, and lasted until 1896, when it was demolished; the site was purchased for the city and naturalistically landscaped by Samuel Parsons Jr. as DeWitt Clinton Park. In 1911 New York Hospital bought a full city block largely of the Hopper property, between 54th and 55th Streets, Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues.[9] Beyond the railroad track, projecting into the river at 54th Street, was Mott's Point, with an 18th-century Mott family house, surrounded by gardens, that was inhabited by members of the family until 1884 and survived until 1895.[10] A lone surviving structure that dates from the time this area was open farmland and suburban villas is the carriage house (pre-1800) that once belonged to a villa owned by ex-Vice President and New York State governor George Clinton, now in a narrow court behind 422 West 46th Street.[11] From 1811 until it was officially de-mapped the ghostly Bloomingdale Square was part of the city's intended future; it extended from 53rd to 57th Streets between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. It was eliminated in 1857 after the establishment of Central Park,[12] and the name shifted to the junction of Broadway, West End Avenue, and 106th Street, now Straus Park. In 1825, for $10 the City purchased clear title to a right-of-way through John Leake Norton's[13] farm, "The Hermitage", to lay out 42nd Street clear to the river. Before long, cattle ferried from Weehawken were being driven along the unpaved route, to slaughterhouses on the East Side.[14] Seventy acres of the Leake, later Norton property, extending north from 42nd to 46th Street and from Broadway to the river, had been purchased before 1807 by Mission House, Hell's John Jacob Astor and William Cutting, who held it before dividing it into building Kitchen, c.