Hunt Hell's Kitchen.

Hell's Kitchen: The Neighborhood That Earned Its Name

Hell's Kitchen occupies the west side of Manhattan between roughly 34th and 59th Streets, from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River. For over a century it was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in New York City — a fact worn with a certain perverse pride by the Irish immigrant families who settled its tenements in the 1840s and 50s after the Famine ships landed. The neighborhood's name has murky origins, but one origin story holds that a rookie cop, watching a riot on 39th Street, told his veteran partner the scene was "hot as hell." The veteran supposedly replied, "This place is hell's kitchen itself." The name held for 170 years.

The most notorious chapter arrived in the 1960s with the Westies — an Irish-American criminal organization that controlled the neighborhood's docks, union locals, and street-level rackets through extreme violence. Their base of operations was a bar at 596 10th Avenue, and their founding boss, Mickey Spillane (no relation to the crime novelist), kept order through a reputation for calculated brutality. Spillane was shot outside his Queens home in 1977. His successor Jimmy Coonan forged an alliance with the Gambino crime family — a rare partnership between Irish and Italian organized crime — and the Westies expanded into contract killing and loan sharking across the city. The FBI dismantled the organization through RICO prosecutions in the late 1980s, but the street addresses where they operated are still standing. The tenement at 516 West 47th Street, Death Avenue's freight rail line, and the old Midtown hospital where shooting victims were quietly admitted all survive as unremarked geography on streets that thousands of tourists walk every week on their way to a Broadway show.

Hell's Kitchen also has a parallel history entirely at odds with its gangland reputation. The affordable brownstones and converted warehouse lofts attracted theater workers, dancers, and acting students — Actors Studio was nearby, and Restaurant Row on West 46th Street became the city's pre-theater dining corridor in the 1950s. The freight rail that ran along 10th Avenue at street level, killing so many pedestrians it was dubbed "Death Avenue," was eventually elevated into what is now the High Line. A StoryHunt through Hell's Kitchen routes you past the Westies' 10th Avenue haunts, the old dockworkers' union halls, and the theater district back alleys — two block-by-block histories that somehow occupied the same geography for decades without fully acknowledging each other.