Hell's Kitchen, NYC ~ An Architectural History ~ by Joe Zito

The Architectural history of Hell’s Kitchen may be divided into three periods. In its first period, in the early 1800s, the Dutch and English farmers lived in wood frame houses cottages and shanties, as they settled in the Bloomingdale Village South, later known as Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s West side.

The only type of public transportation at that time before 1850 were carriages and omnibuses called stagecoaches.

In the second period, about 1950-1880, the population of Hell’s Kitchen grew rapidly when thousands of European immigrants mostly from Germany and Ireland, arrived in New York seeking employment. To provide shelter for them in Hell’s Kitchen, multi-family dwellings in plain unornamented brick were hastily constructed to replace the wooden housing.

Almost as if by chance, in 1852, a new mode of public transportation -– the horse car – came into existence. Pulled by horses, this was a car that ran on railroad tracks in the middle of Ninth Avenue. (Similar horse-cars ran on Second, Third, Sixth and Eighth Avenues.) The horse-car was especially beneficial to most of the residents of Hell’s Kitchen. Because it was much faster, less expensive and carried more passengers than the omnibus, they could then for the first time commute to offices and factories in Downtown New York. Hell’s Kitchen, indeed, form the 1850s to the 1870s, was, in effect, a streetcar suburb of a central city.

It should also be noted, that a small fraction of its residents, blue collar and skilled workers, had no need of the horse-car line because they were employed in New York’s industrial fringe area, a short distance away from their homes in Hell’s Kitchen’s western boundary on Eleventh Avenue to the Hudson River.

A building material that proved its architectural worthiness in the second period and continued in the third was iron, cast in into molds. Cast iron from the 1830’ to 1890s was used in construction of entire buildings. But in Hell’s Kitchen, iron was used only in the ground story of commercial storefronts. Strong in compression, cast iron helped support upper masonry walls. The slender iron columns provided more space and larger store windows for display of merchandise. Compared to materials like limestone and marble, cast iron was inexpensive and could be quickly constructed, important factors for the design of working class architecture.

Two other qualities of cast iron that local architects made use of, was that cast iron parts could be bought in catalogues, and foremost, that is was durable. Maintenance of iron consists of a coat of paint every few years. Along Ninth Avenue today, a sharp-eyed observer can still discover centuries old cast-iron foundry labels that proudly advertise their cast iron products whose shafts and capitals have been designed in intricate geometric or floral pattern.

In its third period, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the population of Hell’s Kitchen had increased dramatically. Immigrants, mostly from Russia, Poland. Hungary, Italy, and the immigrants from New England and the South, found work in New York’s post-Civil War economy that had been transformed from a fairly rich seaport to an industrial metropolis producing goods and services that required massive labor of working and middle class people. The need to provide homes for these professionals and businessmen, as well as the white collar and skilled artisans, brought a radical change in Hell’s Kitchen’s residential architecture of the 1870s and ‘80s. The new buildings had amenities such as running water, bathrooms, and spacious rooms. The new type of multi-family dwellings became known as French Flats – “flat” meaning one floor – the early name for apartment buildings.

Hell’s Kitchen’s third period benefited, again as if by chance, from two events – the use of a new building material, terra cotta, and the development of a new mode of public transportation, the Elevated railway system, reaching Ninth Avenue by 1878. The El was not only much faster and cheaper than the horse-car but it was an urban achievement, providing access to more distant work places and making possible the creation of Greater New York.

The new building material, terra cotta, can be molded like cast iron into intricate geometric and floral forms to decorate the facades of buildings. Because it is inexpensive and durable, it is an ideal material in the architectural design of working and middle class buildings.

Despite being ignored by journalists and architectural historians, there are many buildings in Hell’s Kitchen that deserve to be awarded Landmark status.

by Joe Zito, copyrighted, all rights reserved, originally published in the Clinton Chronicle, June 2006