Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space

Hell’s Kitchen is among Manhattan’s most storied and studied

neighborhoods. A working-class district situated next to the West

Side’s middle- and upper-class residential districts, it has long attracted

the focus of artists and urban planners, writers and reformers.

Now, Joseph Varga takes us on a tour of Hell’s Kitchen

with an eye toward what we usually take for granted: space, and,

particularly, how urban spaces are produced, controlled, and contested

by different class and political forces.

Varga examines events and locations in a crucial period in the

formation of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, the Progressive Era,

and describes how reformers sought to shape the behavior and experiences

of its inhabitants by manipulating the built environment.

But those inhabitants had plans of their own, and thus ensued

a struggle over the very spaces—public and private, commercial

and personal—in which they lived. Varga insightfully considers the

interactions between human actors, the built environment, and

the natural landscape, and suggests how the production of and

struggle over space influence what we think and how we live. In

the process, he raises incisive questions about the meaning of

community, citizenship, and democracy itself.