I’m just wondering how that area came to be so named? I was there tonight and it seemed okay to me!
It’s a lot nicer than it used to be. Fo’ shure.
You’re probably not interested, but there’s a club “brand” in the UK called Gods Kitchen. I doubt very much whether they’re connected though.
And there’s a club in Dublin called “The Kitchen”.
Several thories here: http://www.hellskitchennyc.com/html/name.htm
- It was the name given to a tenement building by a New York Times reporter
- It was a corruption of the name of a German restaurant
- When one cop said the neighborhood was hell, another responded “Hell’s a mild climate. This is Hell’s Kitchen.”
I have no idea which one, if any, is right.
Not mentioned in bibliophage’s link: the area (roughly midtown West Side) was largely a lower- to middle-class Irish neighborhood from its settling in the mid-19th century. Lots of tough Irish gangs flourished there, bars and whorehouses (along with, of course, very nice middle-class households and businesses). Nasty place to be a cop.