Hell's Kitchen

Hell’s Kitchen, the West Side district that starts a few blocks above the Chelsea streets where Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group converted Walker Tower, is easiest to understand through one small object: a one story coffee shop at 602 Ninth Avenue, on the northeast corner of West 43rd Street. The building is ten feet tall on a main commercial avenue lined with walk ups, and the reason it is so low is the neighborhood’s history in miniature.

The building on the corner

Daniel Trubman’s reconstruction from city building records describes it plainly: 988 square feet, no apartments, a certificate of occupancy for 74 people drinking coffee.¹ It was once a four story building with a fire escape and a menswear shop on the ground floor that outfitted waiters and cooks, and a city housing survey in August 1966 counted eleven single room units on the third and fourth floors and one ordinary apartment on the second.¹ In 1968 the owner filed an alteration to remove the top three stories. The party walls stayed, because the neighbors leaned on them; the floor joists stayed to carry the shop; the exposed windows were bricked up; and in January 1969 the city signed off a one story store with no homes in it.¹

Figure

One corner, five layers of rules

1. 01
   1901Foundation, party walls and floor joists of a four story building
2. 02
   1912Ground floor altered into a saloon labeled cafe on the drawings
3. 03
   1937A sprinkler system keeps the upper rooms legally rentable
4. 04
   1968Alteration filed to remove the top three stories
5. 05
   1969Signed off as one story with a store and no homes

Each earlier layer of the building answered a rule. In 1912 a brewer filed drawings turning the ground floor into a saloon, labeled a cafe, serving dockworkers and riders of the Ninth Avenue elevated line. In 1937 someone paid for sprinklers through all four floors so the upper rooms could stay legally rented. Then the incentives flipped: New York banned new single room occupancy buildings in 1955, and Trubman ties the demolition to that policy, to a tax program that rewarded conversion, and to a 1969 city plan expecting Midtown offices to push west.¹ Cut down to a single floor, the corner became a building whose only job was to carry its tax bill while the land waited.

The district that surrounds the corner

The corner sits inside a district whose name has always been contested. Mental Floss’s guide to Manhattan place names puts the area between 34th and 59th Streets, from Eighth or Ninth Avenue to the Hudson, and records that The New York Times first used the name on September 22, 1881, for a tenement on 39th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.² Its origin is folklore: one story has a veteran police officer telling a rookie that hell is a mild climate compared with this kitchen, another credits a local gang.²

The people came for work. Michael Minn’s photographic survey describes a shantytown of poor Irish immigrants in the mid nineteenth century, drawn by the docks and the railroad, followed by tenements after the Civil War.³ The CUNY City Tech OpenLab timeline adds African American laborers on the Croton Aqueduct in the 1840s and, from the 1850s, Irish and German workers in slaughterhouses, lumberyards, factories and warehouses.⁴ Freight trains ran in the avenues. The TrailLink account of the West Side line describes mounted flagmen, the West Side Cowboys, riding in front of the engines on Tenth Avenue, known as Death Avenue for its accidents, until the West Side Improvement agreed in 1929 lifted the tracks south of the 30th Street yard.⁶

Infrastructure then took large bites. The OpenLab timeline records that tunnel construction from the 1930s through the 1950s cleared many tenements, that the Port Authority Bus Terminal opened in 1949 with ramps that destroyed much of the district south of 41st Street, and that the Lincoln Tunnel approaches followed in the 1950s.⁴ Around 1959, developers pushed the name Clinton, after DeWitt Clinton Park at 52nd Street and Eleventh Avenue, hoping for a cleaner image; Minn notes that the old name outlasted the campaign.³ Both names are still used, though Mental Floss observes that residents and other New Yorkers still proudly say Hell’s Kitchen.²

Figure

The district's turning points

1. 01
   1850sIrish and German immigrants work the docks, slaughterhouses and railroad
2. 02
   1930s to 1950sLincoln Tunnel works clear many tenements
3. 03
   1949The Port Authority Bus Terminal opens and its ramps take much of the southern edge
4. 04
   1970sManhattan Plaza opens with most apartments set aside for people in the arts
5. 05
   2000sMore than 100 restaurants line Ninth and Tenth Avenues

The 1970s brought the protection that came too late for 602 Ninth Avenue. Housing Conservation Coordinators, an advocacy group for renters founded in 1972, describes landlords abandoning buildings during the city’s fiscal crisis, tenants learning to run their own boilers, and the city seizing tax delinquent buildings and offering them to their tenants as low income cooperatives.⁵ The group worked with residents and the city on a special zoning district that limited building heights, barred demolition of residential buildings and guarded tenants against harassment.⁵ Trubman dates the steps: a one year interim preservation district adopted in 1973, then the Special Clinton District approved by the City Planning Commission on October 21, 1974, and adopted by the Board of Estimate that November, written to shield the area from pressure expected from a convention center planned on the river.¹ The OpenLab timeline credits Manhattan Plaza, two towers with most apartments reserved for people working in the arts, with helping to turn the neighborhood around, and notes that more than 100 restaurants now line Ninth and Tenth Avenues.⁴

Chelsea, directly south, shared the railroad and the river but took a different path; see Chelsea. Back on the corner of 43rd Street, the coffee shop still stands at one story, low because it was cut down in the last years before the district’s own rules would have kept it whole. Its brick patches over the old windows are the plainest record in Hell’s Kitchen of how housing policy, tax pressure and zoning each left their mark on a single lot.