The Washington times., 1935-05-25
Hell's Kitchen


ceived for building the New
York approach to the Midtown
Hudson Tunnel, and this wide
new plaza will be a wholesome
thrust into the heart of Hell's
Kitchen, murder mart of old
New York.
Once in a while I see a let
ter in a newspaper from some
sentimental old-timer, trying to
make out that Hell's Kitchen
wasn't really so bad as it was
supposed to be, and pointing
out that bishops, polo players,
bankers and great business men
have come out Of that district.
But no matter how impressive
the alumni association, the
Hell's Kitchen, which veteran
New York newspaper men re-
member, has no roseate memor.
les of any sort and, while it
may now be just a kitchenette,
with the reforms Of recent
years, it will be good radiance
when those sleazy old dumps
are swept into limbo, along with
their age-old aura of human
degradation.
Old New York, reprehensively
think, used to seem rather
proud of it's worst hell holes.
Pop-eyed visitors used to want
to see the Bowery, Hell's
Kitchen, the Five Points and
Cockroach Row and Laight
Street, where, in the House Of
the Blazers, they used to in
cinerate some hapless citizen
every once in a while.
SINKS OF CRIME
These regions were supposed
to be picturesque. Yokels got
a thrill out of such supernal
wickedness, and New Workers
encouraged them in it. Books
of the day profess an appro-
pirate moral horror, but on the
whole these sinks of misery
and crime were accepted as a
part of the landscape. "For
the poor We have always with
you," they used to quote, pi-
ously.
It never seemed to me that
DR.. Parkhurst and all the other
valiant contenders against
slums and wickedness made
much of a dent in the devils
breaStworks. Changing business
and economic forces did,
though. AS the years passed,
New York's areas Of picturesque
dirt and despair disappeared
one by one. @
The Bowery is as innocuous
and, in spots, as clean as a sub
urban Main Street. The Five
Points has been a fast receding
memory for these many decades.
The lower East Side highways of
thuggery have all but disap-
peared. There are foul and fetid
tenements, but there are no
longer such rampant and boast
full imitators of Limehouse as
were those old thoroughfares Of
stews, flop houses and murder
joints.
Transportation anged
things a lot, draining the under
privileged-what a quaint social
settlement aura that word has!
into the wider reaches of the
Bronx or into the suburbs. The
juggernaut of rising land values
crushed myriads of the old tene-
ments. ramparts of disease and
brutality.
Inexorable large-scale changes,
rather than reform or legisla-
ton or even a healthier civic
consciousness, seems to have
wrought these differences.
Slums are on the way out
with the impact of events rather
than moral convictions. Hell'S
Kitchen has hung on. tanned a
lot in recent years, but still a
hangnail of ugliness and vio-
lence. No very bitter tears will
be shed when the tunnel build
ers start swinging their picks
into those gloomy old tene-
ments. They'll let in the light
and air and speed families under
the river to a grand open-air
new deal over in New Jersey
Ind up in Rockland county.
In my day, reporters, working
around and from the old Ten
derloin station, used to walk in
the middle of the street II they