Naming Hell's Kitchen

by Sandy Ikeda
Fri, 19 Sep 2008 at 12:26 PM

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Last evening at a dinner party someone asked about the origin of the name "Hell's Kitchen." That's the neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan just north of Chelsea and south of 57th street, which realtors for some time now have been trying to rename "Clinton" (after the former New York governor, not the current senator).

It was the perfect opportunity to consult a book I just bought at the Brooklyn Book Festival called "Naming New York: Manhattan Places & How They Got Their Names" by Sanna Feirstein. I was surprised to discover that it had no entry for "Hell's Kitchen" per se, but did have a very brief one for "Hell's Kitchen Park," according to which "the name was adopted from that of a gang of hoodlums who terrorized this area in the latter part of the 19th century."

These days, of course, inquiries of this nature usually start (and all too often end) with Wikipedia. The lengthy entry on that site, though, is not conclusive. It cites Davy Crockett's assessment of the Irish gangs in Five Points (the naming of which no one disputes) as being "too mean to swab hell's kitchen." But Five Points, in Chinatown, is quite a ways from Midtown. Then there's the infamous building on 39th Street allegedly called Hell's Kitchen, the name of which a local gang is said to have taken for itself. This corroborates Ms. Feirstein's entry. So perhaps the line of causation runs from building to gang to district. However, the entry goes on to say that the most common version claims "Dutch Fred The Cop" coined the name after witnessing a riot.

I finally consulted Kenneth Jackson's authoritative "The Encyclopedia of New York": "The name Hell's Kitchen was perhaps taken from that of a gang formed in the area in 1868, or adopted by local police in the 1870s." So now from gang to police to district? The common element of most these explanations, however, is a gang with that name.

Two things. First, while this is a very small sample size (of one), it's impressive that Ms. Feirstein's little book (about 1/10 the sheer weight of Jackson's) got it basically right, or gave in a short passage the answer that I distilled from the much longer Wikipedia and Encyclopedia entries. Second, while on the one hand most of us like definitive answers to these kinds of questions, I think a little mystery in matters such as this adds to the appeal to this town. Like a good tale, it remains obscure around the edges.

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