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Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed in American Journal of Sociology

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space

"A fascinating history of an important historic neighborhood and a provocative analysis of the ways in which interest groups vie for control of urban geography."

—Tyler Anbinder, author, Five Points

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894–1914. By Joseph J. Varga. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013. Pp. 269. $18.95 (paper).

David J. Madden
London School of Economics

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space, Joseph J. Varga’s study of the social production of the Middle West Side in Progressive-Era New York City, is an extended explication of one of the major arguments in urban studies: that urbanites make their own city but not under conditions of their choosing. The book is also a thoroughly researched application of contemporary urban theory to historical material. Intricately combing through newspaper stories, government analyses, social workers’ reports, planning proposals, photographic collections, and other archival sources, Varga exhumes the multiple discourses, practices, and institutions that shaped everyday life in this poor and working-class pocket of industrial Manhattan.

Neither Varga nor anyone else is completely certain about the origin of the name Hell’s Kitchen, though infernal toponyms seem to have been a routine part of the symbolic landscape of early 20th-century American urbanism (e.g., Chicago’s Little Hell and Hell’s Half Acre in Brooklyn). The Middle West Side at the time may not have been quite the ethnonational mosaic that was the more famous Lower East Side. But like its downtown counterpart, the neighborhood was both proletarian and cosmopolitan. Many of the men of the Middle West Side worked at the docks and in small factories located nearby. Women worked in garment production and in laundries, and many also engaged in various forms of homework. The area was “nearly evenly split between foreign born and those born in the
United States” ðp. 23Þ. Irish and German immigrants who had settled there throughout the 19th century were joined by their compatriots from later waves of immigration. Significant numbers of Jews, Italians, Croats, various Scandinavians, Russians, and other immigrant groups lived in the vicinity as well. The district was also home to significant numbers of African-Americans—before the first Great Migration and the rise of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the part of the Middle West Side then called San Juan Hill was the center of black New York…

In its detailed analysis of the production of everyday life in the Middle West Side and its overall combination of spatial theory and historical research, Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space is a solid contribution to urban studies and a welcome addition to the sociological literature on New York City.

Read the entire review in the American Journal of Sociology

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