Hell’s Kitchen a.k.a. Clinton, NY did not receive its notorious reputation for any false rumor or reason. Gang violence, police bribery, prostitution, and street violence highlighted the area for decades until gentrification and displacement transformed the area into a hub for restaurants and wealthy apartments. The north end of 57th street to the south end of 35th street and 6th avenue to the Hudson River bound the area. The wave of immigrants in the late 19th century onward along with the rise of cheaper apartment buildings laid the foundation for the rise of crime. Once known as Great Kill (The Peopling), Hell’s Kitchen became a textbook example of the 20th-century gang-oriented city. Those historical remnants are lost now, but the historical accounts combined with historical sites remain as a memoir of those turbulent times. 
        The area known as Hell’s Kitchen started its infamous history in the 1880s but before such history, the area was known for the river which flowed into the Hudson River. Before the late 19th century, Hell’s Kitchen was known as Great Kill (The Peopling) due to the Dutch naming of a river that “ flowed into the Hudson along what is now West 41st street” (The Peopling). Kill comes from the Dutch meaning river and so, the Great Kill means the Great River. After this historical time, the next recording of major activity in the Hell’s Kitchen area is during the Civil War. In the 1860s, Hell’s Kitchen became “a haven for large numbers of deserters, and… some of the worst excesses of the Draft Riots of 1863 [where] the residents of the precinct erected barricades against the police up and down 9th Avenue” (New York). The area before the immigration wave was already an escape city for war deserters who most likely did not find work or shelter easily. During the Draft Riots of 1863, pro-slavery men rioted against government buildings and even worse, “eradicate the working-class black male presence from the city [by] …. g[i]v[ing] all these workers license to physically remove blacks from worksites[,]” attacked most of the black population, lynched them, and attacked any white men who sympathized with the black population in the city (Harris). After the Civil War, New York became more favoring and protective of the black population, especially in New York City, and moved onto attacking the new immigration population of Hell’s Kitchen. 
        After the Civil War, although laws improved for the black population, real reform would not take place into the late 20th century, and the influx of immigrants only presented further violence for the city. After the Draft Riots in 1863, relief efforts and recovery groups for the previously enslaved and attacked black population were established. These included the “Union League Club and the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People [which] spearheaded relief efforts to blacks, providing forty thousand dollars to almost twenty-five hundred riot victims and finding new jobs and homes for blacks” (Harris). Nevertheless, this “never completely erase[d] the racial concerns that had been part of the draft riots” (Harris). These led into the 19th century where the second industrial revolution paralleled the migration of Irish and German immigrants to the U.S. The area grew into a manufacturing and shipping site as well, attracting these new immigrants in search of labor (Leidenberger). The clash of ethnicities along with the rise of “ apartment buildings springing up throughout Manhattan” (The Peopling) led to “its reputation for vice and crime and recurrent race and ethnic riots” (Leidenberger). The area became the textbook example for overrun tenements and an overcrowded, working immigrant class city. In 1902, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker climbed up and down these tenements, attempting to record and resolve the rising infant mortality rate (The History). In her recordings, she described the area as having “cockroaches skittering across the floors, dead flies floating in milk bottles, and ‘dying baby after dying baby.’” (The History). From the Draft Riots of 1863, the history of terror, the commonality of violence towards the end of the 19th century (The Peopling), and terrible poverty of Hell’s Kitchen fluctuated until the mid-20th century. 
         Hell’s Kitchen during the late 19th century to the mid-20th century became a hub for criminal activity: police brutality, drunken violence, robberies, murder, prostitution, vagrancy, domestic violence, and most prominent, gang wars. The poverty of the area, the ethnic clashes, and the class struggle are the most popular causes of this terrible history. Hell’s Kitchen’s rise came about as “ a mixture of both black and Irish slums [where] it served as a hotbed of criminal activities between various Irish gangs” (Hell’s). The very first gang, the Nineteenth Street Gang” formed in the 1870s; it “later formed the Tenth Avenue gang, [would] ultimately joined the Hell’s Kitchen Gang” (The Peopling). Even though the police put an end to this gang, more gangs such as the “the Battle Row Gang, the Gophers, the Rhodes Gang, and the Gorillas all developed in Hell’s Kitchen to fight the last bit of law and order left in the community” (The Peopling). The active gang presence resulted in daily violence even to quiet and reserved civilians. No police reports could save them as the police force was corrupt as well; corrupt police officers took bribes and “justified [their] [abusive] [police] [practices] in terms of their victims’ class, ethnicity, and gender” all over Hell’s Kitchen (Leidenberger). An intense standoff between the mobs and the police took place on July 20, 1889. Racialized police brutality had intensified so greatly that day that “the African American community, originally fearful of their [w]hite neighbors were now running toward the mobs just to escape the police brutality” (The Peopling). The pattern of gang violence was also passed on from generation to generation. Irish and German immigrants were known to be “well versed in drinking and subsequent violence [which] seemed to produce thousands upon thousands of homeless children living on the streets” and eventually, more gang members, prostitution, or general crimes (The Peopling). With the establishment of gangs, the region became lost in the mobster world. 
        Various gangs ran various parts of Hell’s Kitchen which then affects commerce, employment, and the order of the community. The Battle Row Gang from the early 20th century ran “old-law tenements and belching riverfront factories” (Battle). The Gopher Gang from the same time were “hired out by businesses and labor unions throughout several violent labor disputes” (Forsyth). Moreover, no civilian could not, one way or another, encounter a gang member and have had some sort of influence on their lives from them. Eventually calls for restructuring Hell’s Kitchen, architecture and society was, spurred about. In 1948, the New York Times released an article titled “Hell’s Kitchen Yields To Modern Projects”  in which engineers took over the area lining the Hudson River (By). The state desired to establish a “large indoor stadium and convention hall,... pier rehabilitation,... new public food mart, [and]... [a]partments for more than three thousand persons in the lower income stratum” (By). The ambition to “clean-up” Hell’s Kitchen started as an honest rebuilding of the area but would eventually turn into another gentrified area displacing populations.  
      In the 1950s, Puerto Ricans made their way onto the Hell’s Kitchen scene, but this would be one of the last xenophobic encounters in this area as gentrification and a crackdown on crime ensued soon after. As the influx of Puerto Ricans in “became more and more prevalent, the ethnic tension between the established residents of the neighborhood and the newcomers intensified the atmosphere of violence and hostility” (Hell’s). Of course, this is due to no other reason than “[the] host of fallacious myths, stereotypes, prejudicial writing, and tenuously undergirded short-run studies [which] diverted a normal population movement into the category of the ‘Puerto Rican Problem’” (Rosner). About a decade later, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story was produced, a Romeo and Juliet love story captured in an environment similar if not based upon Hell’s Kitchen. The hell in this place continued until the 1980s when the state started its gentrification process. 
       Since the 1980s, the citizens of Hell’s Kitchen have reviewed the area with positive remarks: “one of the safest areas” and “a terrific neighborhood to raise children” are among them (Jacobson). The area around Hell’s Kitchen has adapted to this process as well, creating an altogether different area than from just a few decades ago. The area around Hell’s Kitchen includes the “development of Hudson Yards and the High Line just to its south and the addition of the Time Warner Center on its northeast border” (Jacobson). Now, buildings have been reconstructed to the highest degree of luxury, raising the cost of such apartments exponentially. The Stella Towers is likely the most prominent example of this. The state has “renovated [apartments] in older buildings to command higher rents from new tenants, and new retailers have pushed out services like laundromats” (Jacobson). Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a resident of the past Hell’s Kitchen, visited the area, shocked to see “what used to be the neighborhood slaughterhouse… where gangs of night and day laborers worked up some of the toughest thirsts in the city” (By, Francis) gone because of the renovations. Moreover, in spite of the usual class and race dividing effect of gentrification, Hell’s Kitchen claims to “represent the level of diversity seen elsewhere in New York City” by “ma[king] room for Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, Puerto Ricans, Peruvians, and Ecuadorians" on top of the historical Irish and German population (Hell’s). The state has even tried to remove the classic nickname “Hell’s Kitchen” and renew the place with a classier name: Clinton. A classic example of history repeating itself: in 1937, The West Side Association of Commerce called for similar action citing “it is objectionable to the honest people who own property or who make a livelihood on the West Side” (West). Although many do enjoy the safety and elegance of the area now, a pushback still exists “from many locals who wish to ‘hold onto its original working-class character,’ as well as it’s rough-and-tumble past’” (qtd. in Hell’s). 
        Hell’s Kitchen’s past, despite all efforts, will never leave it. Parks, businesses, and even the people are remaining and (so far) undying elements that keep the history of Hell’s Kitchen alive and well-known. Though the locals enjoy the serenity, the classic mob past will never leave the skin of the city. It’s a regrettable tattoo that still left the remnant of its shape as the state tried to remove it.