In this essay I will be exploring Hell's Kitchen as it relates to the book Hell's kitchen, written by William Carlos Williams. How A community divided by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood boundaries, was still united by common styles, slang, and codes of honor. .
Hell's Kitchen is the section of Manhattan that is between 34th and 59th Streets and from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River that glowed, simmered, and frequently boiled over with crime and corruption in the latter part of the 19th century. For decades after the Civil War, Notorious gangs ruled the streets between the tenements, grocery shops, slaughter houses, railroad yards, and gas works. It was the home of New York's most dangerous criminals known during that time in our history . The population consisted of poor people who lived in a disorderly fashion and expressed themselves with a demanding spirit. Reports of criminal homicide from the late nineteenth century only supply a minimal idea of the daily life in Hell's Kitchen. These reports illustrate a neighborhood full of crime, poverty, and hard work. Whatever the origin of the name, it fits. Hell's Kitchen was troubled by violence and general disorder from an early point in its history as depicted in William Carlos Williams story. In 1851 the Hudson River Railroad opened a station at West 30th Street, and the development of the railway brought factories, lumberyards, slaughterhouses and tenements to house the numerous immigrant workers. Poverty and close quarters breed ill will between neighbors, and riots erupted between the Irish Catholics and Protestants as well as between the Irish and African-Americans. Eventually, gangs such as the Gophers and later the West's ruled the streets. Hell's Kitchen also served as an appropriate setting for one of the most famous gang rivalry's of all: the Sharks and the Jets in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. Gangs fought and sometimes killed to expand their territory.
