Hell's Kitchen, NYC ~ How Hell's Kitchen Got Its Name ~ by Joe Zito

At One time there were two Hell's Kitchens -- the earlier one was in London; the later one was in New York City and was named after the one in London.

That there was a hell's Kitchen in London is documented in a book entitled "Hells Kitchen - The Story of London's Underworld" written in 1930 by a notorious professional British criminal under the name of Ingram G. Hall (obviously a pseudonym). "My story," Hall states, "is that of Hell's Kitchen as it is called by those of us who live in it."

The book was edited by De Witt Mackensie, a reputable London publisher of a large newspaper syndicate and printed by Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 3 York Street, London.

In another book entitled "Hell's Kitchen," Richard O'Connor, a New York biographer, states: "The designation Hell's Kitchen was imported from England. A section of London noted for its crime and disorder once was called Hell's Kitchen and the generic phrase may well have been brought over by English immigrants who were among the first to settle in this neighborhood."

The two Hell's Kitchens, if not identical, were essentially similar; both were originally rural areas on the outskirts of a large city that had been dramatically transformed into urban fringe industrial zones created by the emerging nineteenth century Industrial Revolution.

London's Hell's Kitchen had been confined to a section in its East End outside the city limits and alongside of and near the River Thames. Its epicenter included the rural villages of Hoyton, Bethnal Green and Limehouse (the locale of Jack the Ripper).

New York City's Hell's Kitchen had been confined in its Mid-west Side to a large region of sparsely inhabited marshlands and Dutch and Colonial farmlands that provided a concentrated, compact industrial zone. Its streets were lined with single-family brownstone dwellings, boarding houses, typical working-class New York City tenements, service stores, churches, schools, horse-car lines, and elevated railway tracks.

Another striking parallel between the two Hell's Kitchens was a socioeconomic one. Amid the areas that had been selected to isolate the obnoxious urban fringe activities of slaughterhouses, breweries, stables, factories, railroad yards, and lumber, stone, and coal yards, ramshackle, jerry-built rookeries to house hordes of illiterate foreign-born laborers had been constructed. In these squalid slums, poverty, filth, disease, vice, disorder, and crimes committed by vicious gangs and denizens of the underworld virtually dehumanized both Hell's Kitchens.

In the homogeneous history of the two human hell-holes that have been covered over and obliterated in modern times, there lingers one difference between them. In London the name Hell's Kitchen has been abandoned; in New York City the name Hell's Kitchen is still firmly entrenched.

By Joe Zito, copyrighted, all rights reserved,originally published in the Clinton Chronicle, March 2006