"Case in point, it’s hard to pin down exactly what constitutes the neighborhood’s boundaries. According to the New York City government, Clinton (as Hell’s Kitchen is officially designated) is the area from 34th Street to 59th Street and Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River... Hell’s Kitchen has long existed in the collective psyche of New Yorkers as both a microcosm of the city’s ills and a breeding ground for the unlawful. It has captured the imaginations of artists and writers, and has been the backdrop for many hard-edged films, including “State of Grace,” “Sleepers,” and the recent critically acclaimed “In America.”... Considering its history, that brutal reputation is well deserved... Although originally a district of streams and meadows, the area’s fortunes changed in the mid-1800s with the construction of slaughterhouses and factories. Immigrant workers soon flooded the area to take advantage of the newly created jobs and row after row of low-rent tenement houses were built to house them... Unpleasant working and living conditions contributed to an atmosphere conducive to riots and the formation of neighborhood gangs. Rough times there continued as Hell’s Kitchen became a favorite stomping ground for the City’s most notorious criminals and a refuge for the homeless in the days of the Great Depression... More recently, the area was known as a haunt for drug deals and prostitution. The infamous Westie’s, an Irish-American gang, terrorized the neighborhood well into the 1960s...
Efforts in the 1990s to clean up the area have been largely successful. Today, Hell’s Kitchen bears little resemblance to its infernal moniker... With the change in the neighborhood’s fortunes has also come a new willingness to live there..."
-- Ettore Toppi, Hotter than … Chelsea?: How Hell’s Kitchen went from gangland to the city’s ‘gay ghetto’
Friday, January 30, 2004, New York Blade