Max Bachhuber, Josh Sloan, Will Solomon
THESIS: How do architectural development, economic profusion, and municipal influence affect the ethnic composition of a community?
Using two extremely disparate neighborhoods, Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper East Side, we seek to illustrate that gentrification is not an isolated process. Issues such as the neighborhoods’ images, the “old guard” of residents, and an increased city-wide focus on development prove that the evolution of a neighborhood is far more complex than simply the movement of residents. Outside forces dictate whether a neighborhood leans white, black, etc. rather than simple choice.
Hell’s Kitchen dates back to the 1800’s, when the neighborhood immediately became the niche for gang violence and squalor. The New York Times even in 1881 referred to the tenements on 39th and 9th avenue as “a place where vice in its most repulsive form thrives.” After more than a century of notoriety and infamy, the name Clinton was branded to the neighborhood in attempt to cleanse the town’s reputation and restore civil society to its long time roots. Ironically, the now prosperous neighborhood uses its moniker as a marketing tool. As you walk through the streets of hell kitchen, and as evidenced in the documentary we filmed, trendy restaurants incorporate “HK” or “Hell’s Kitchen” to give the restaurant an air of legitimacy. Hell’s Kitchen has also become a refuge for the artistically inclined – it’s become the home to many fledgling artists and writers alike. Hell’s Kitchen has long attracted acting and entertainment types. The area has been a home to Jimmy Dean, Bob Hope, Larry David and Alicia Keys. There’s something about this area that inspires people to create. It’s also home to the renowned Actors Studio, which has seen innumerate stars-in-the-making pass through its doors. The Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater reside here too. Currently, shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are filmed at studios in Hell’sKitchen. Being in the heart of the Theater District, it’s always easy enough to find quality drama, music and improv comedy any night of the week.
Despite the various potential sources for the neighborhoods title Hell’s Kitchen, there is one undeniable association with the area and its vast array of cuisine. Hell’s Kitchen produces exciting cuisine you won’t find anywhere else in Manhattan. Ninth Avenue is a renowned hotspot for ethnic cuisine; here, you can pick up anything from Caribbean to Chinese, and Italian to Irish.
Hell’s Kitchen didn’t always exude the peaceful and gentrified ambience it does today. The traditional restaurants that are said to have given hell’s kitchen its name and the powerful impression it has today is due to increased prosperities, although before the booming food industry marked hell’s kitchen, the venue told a different tale. Hell’s Kitchen was home to criminals and gangsters, littering the neighborhood with crime and preventing its proliferation. In 1959, Hell’s Kitchen became the sight for real gang murders. On West 46th street between 9th and 10th avenue, a member of the Puerto Rican Vampires, spoiling for a fight with the Norsemen, an Irish gang, knifed two innocent teenagers to death. A war between Mr. Spillane and Jimmy Coonan, a younger rival, littered Hell’s Kitchen with corpses from the late 1960s until Mr. Spillane was shot dead in Queens in 1977. His murder was an apparent mob hit; he’d been feuding with the Mafia boss Fat Tony Salerno over the lucrative racketeering opportunities presented by the planned Jacob K. Javits Convention Center between 11th and 12th Avenues. Mr. Coonan’s reign was savage. The appropriately grim-looking Hudsonview Terrace apartment tower (747 10th Avenue, between West 50th and West 51st Streets), built in 1976 under the Mitchell-Lama affordable housing program, was the scene of one of his infamously grisly killings. On Jan. 18, 1978, in a Hudsonview apartment, he and two associates murdered Rickey Tassiello, a small-time gambler who owed Mr. Coonan $1,250. Then they dismembered the body in the bathtub and hauled out the pieces in garbage bags — all except the hands, which Mr. Coonan put in baggies and placed in the refrigerator’s freezer. He planned to retrieve them later to put Mr. Tassiello’s fingerprints on a pistol he would use in another murder, to throw off investigators. Hell’s Kitchen perpetuated its damaged reputation into the 1980’s, when police referred to the area as the “westies” due to the inordinate amount of Murder, theft, arson, extortion, gambling, loan-sharking, liquor, drugs, nightclubs.
HK was once beloved for its distinction against the pristine Upper East Side, the family oriented Upper West Side, and the “fratty” Murray Hill. The New York Times called hell’s Kitchen the “quintessential” New York neighborhood in the year 2000, although gentrification has taken Hell’s Kitchen in a different direction over the past decade. Overdeveloping has been accused of being the culprit, leading to the blurring of distinction between the aforementioned cities. Hell’s Kitchen has become gentrified to the extent that families intent on raising kids in this once welcoming neighborhood no longer see that as a viable option. It’s quite unfortunate that in Hell’s Kitchen (as in most of Manhattan), the middle class is scarce, local businesses have been forced out by rising rents and competition from multi-national corporations, and creative types have migrated elsewhere. Yes, Hell’s Kitchen remains more interesting and diverse than pretty much everywhere else in America. That is, if you can afford live there.
The Upper East Side is perhaps the neighborhood most unlike Hell’s Kitchen. With a predominantly white, affluent makeup, the neighborhood stands in stark contrast next to Hell’s Kitchen and its history of violence. The UES has long been a bastion of New York’s aristocracy; Edith Warton portrays it as a stately place in her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, and even today, Madonna owns an expansive residence in the neighborhood. Bordering East Harlem merely exacerbates the ostentation of the area, poverty and wealth scraping against one another. “Upper East Side” and “wealth” may as well be synonymous. Aside from Hunter College, the neighborhood is home to Gracie Mansion, along with historically containing such dynasties of modern power as the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, and the Roosevelts. Its museums are among the world’s most celebrated, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney (named for yet another family of extravagant wealth who inhabited the area). It has the highest price of real estate per square foot, already at a staggering $856 in 2002. It embodies a whiteness and a richness so pervasive that a reverse-gentrification may be the order of the day.
