August 28, 2009, 7:30 am By Sewell Chan AND Bobby Allyn 
Sam Falk/The New York Times Patrolman Gerald J. Doherty, 52, surveyed his beat in Hell’s Kitchen in 1959, after two teenage boys were killed in a playground on West 46th Street. 
A New York Times article on Sept. 1, 1959, described the effort to banish the name Hell’s Kitchen.A number of New York City neighborhood names — TriBeCa, NoLIta, Dumbo and now SoBro come to mind — are widely known to be the creation of real estate developers.
Hell’s Kitchen is quite the opposite.
For a half-century now, business interests have been trying to make the neighborhood’s colorful if forbidding name fade away. After all, the name Hell’s Kitchen — the setting for the 1957 musical “West Side Story” [pdf] — hardly seems like an appealing place to rent an expensive apartment and raise children.
The push to banish the tough, gang-evoking name stems from two killings of two teenagers that occurred 50 years ago this month.
On Aug. 30, 1959, Andrew Krzesinski and Robert Young, both 16, were fatally stabbed in a playground on West 46th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. A third teenager was stabbed, and two others were beaten. Nine teenagers — most of them said to be gang members — were later charged in connection with the crimes. Several press accounts of the killings referred to the neighborhood as Hell’s Kitchen.
A brief article in The Times, with the headline “No Hell’s Kitchen, Business Men Say,” recorded the dismay of the West Side Association of Commerce. Its executive vice president, James W. Danahy, declared that the name hadn’t been used “for more than half a century” and was “colorful but erroneous.” The name had originated, The Times reported, citing Mr. Danahy, in “brawls between neighborhood youths and New Jersey sheep and cattle men delivering their stock” to West Side slaughterhouses.
The suggested, more genteel replacement for Hell’s Kitchen: Clinton, derived from DeWitt Clinton Park, a 5.8-acre patch of green space that sits between West 52nd and 54th Streets, from 11th to 12th Avenues.
For a while, the new name appeared to stick. The entry for Hell’s Kitchen in the first edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City, published in 1995, calls the name “largely disused.” The entry, by George Winslow, describes the area — bounded loosely by 59th Street to the north, Eighth Avenue to the east, 30th Street to the south and the Hudson River to the west — as a largely Irish area of slaughterhouses, warehouses, lumberyards and factories, many of them linked with a railroad station that opened in 1851.
“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,” Mr. Winslow wrote.
Eastern Europeans moved into the area in the early 20th century, followed by southern blacks and Puerto Ricans in the 1940s.
Even as the neighborhood has evolved and gentrified — lately, it has become popular among gay men — the name Hell’s Kitchen has stuck. Of 10 or so residents and workers in the neighborhood interviewed recently, none used the name Clinton.
“If I hear someone refer to it as Clinton I won’t correct them, but to me it’s Hell’s Kitchen,” said Jeffrey Self, a 22-year-old writer, who said the historic name “has a certain allure.”
Collette Black, 54, a stage director, said: “The people who live in this neighborhood will always call it Hell’s Kitchen. The new high-risers might call it Clinton, but people without doormen will continue to call it what it is. I’m proud of it. If I heard Clinton I wouldn’t think this neighborhood. I’d think they were talking about Brooklyn or someplace.” (Ms. Black was thinking of Clinton Hill, we suspect.)
Olga Lebron, 42, a hairdresser, said of Hell’s Kitchen: “It’s what it’s called. It makes people’s heads turn. And it’s what people like about it.”
Even those who don’t like the name use it.
Asked about the name Clinton, Thomas McCormick, 56, a steam fitter, responded:
Anything is better than Hell’s Kitchen. … You might as well name it after yourself. But 20 years ago you wouldn’t be asking me this question. Then the streets were filled with hookers and junkies. And I remember. I’m old so I use old name. A new name doesn’t change the place.
Mr. McCormick added that “other people who are old” are not going to call it by the new name.
Kate Rooney, 26, a restaurant manager, said of the proposed alternative: “Clinton is a stupid example of gentrification. I’ll never call it that. It’s a name like Hell’s Kitchen that make New York neighborhoods quirky.”
City Room tracked down Mr. Winslow, who left New York City in 2003 and lives in Tillamook, Ore., where he is a freelance writer.
Told that Hell’s Kitchen is not — at least now — a “largely disused” name, he responded with delight. “It’s actually great to hear that people are using the name by which the neighborhood has been known, because it does conjure up that old history,” he said.
Excerpts from The New York Times' The Long Not Summer: A Calendar Quirk Stretches the Season By N. R. Kleinfield
