Hell's Kitchen

When we come to NYC, we tend to stay down near Greenwich Village, or Chelsea. The neighborhoods in NYC are very distinct, and if you get in the wrong one it’s like being in a foreign country and not understanding the language very well.  You may well think you're ordering chicken and find out later that you had goat for dinner.  Not inappropriate, but sometimes a bit surprising.

We sometimes stay in a hotel, but if at all possible we like to use someone’s apartment. It’s not that you have that much more room – the studio apartment we’re staying in now is about the size of a hotel room, except it does have a little kitchen attached to it – but usually it’s cheaper (or free, if you have friends that are very generous) and a bit more in touch with the neighborhood than a hotel.

This is, after all, peoples’ homes and it’s not all transient folks just visiting. You don’t tend to get loud people in the hallway at night, they know you at the security desk (if there is one) and your host tends to leave notes about where to go for local diners, grocery store, cleaners, etc. – anything you might actually need.

One thing this has led us to do is start packing less, on the theory that we can drop clothes at the laundry down the street, pick them up later and we don’t have to tote all that. We can barely get by for a week in a carry on suitcase now, and that should make things a lot easier.

New Yorkers have a wonderful theory about laundry.  You take it all down the street to a service -- not just your dry cleaning, but socks, underwear, sheets and everything -- they wash, dry and fold it, charge you by the pound and return it to you in a lightweight duffel bag.  Nobody has a washer and dryer, so you don't have to feel guilty about sending all of your laundry out.  How easy is that?

This time, we’re in Hell’s Kitchen, which is in the throws of regentrification.

For those unfamiliar with the lingo, that means that people with jobs are buying up the dilapidated property from folks who may not have a job or landlords who have gotten tired of the hassles of dealing with tenants, giving up their nights and weekends for several years (not to mention all of their available cash and whatever they can squeeze onto a credit card) and improving the property in hopes of increasing the resale value.

As a result, neighborhoods tend to improve because you get rid of empty buildings with broken windows, etc. People who actually own the buildings live in or near them, meaning they have a personal incentive to reinvest and improve the property.  The blight is at least relocated, if not eliminated.

Hell’s Kitchen is a neighborhood of Manhattan covering that area between 38th and 59th Street, from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River. It’s just west of the Times Square Theater District and just north of Chelsea. It was known for years as having been run by the Irish American Mob, and served primarily as a location for support industries – transportation, hospital and warehouses – for the midtown Manhattan business district.

All good crime-family type industries that make money!

There were several versions of the story about why this neighborhood came to be called Hell’s Kitchen. Some say that it’s after a bar that had that name. Another version says that Davy Crockett named it (yeah, the one from Texas fame), making reference to the “Five Points” part of the City and saying that the Irishmen who lived in the area, “ . . . were too mean to swab Hell’s Kitchen."

The version I like best is that “Dutch Fred the Cop” was talking to his rookie partner as they watched a small riot take place in the neighborhood.

Notice that the senior cop did NOT jump into the fray – he simply watched for a bit, letting the participants burn themselves out for a while.

Anyhow, the rookie said, “This place is Hell itself,” to which Dutch Fred responded, “Hell is a milder climate. This is actually Hell’s Kitchen.” Given that air conditioning was unknown at the time and kitchens were absolutely miserable, especially in the summer, I think this is probably likely. It makes a good story, anyhow – especially with a main character named “Dutch Fred the Cop”.

Hell’s Kitchen is now the up and coming neighborhood to be in, with new buildings, significant renovations and a substantial deviation from the earlier crime issues that existed.

Our accommodations are in a relatively new high rise building at 43rd and 11th. We’re on the 4th floor, which we’ve learned is still high enough for the wind to whistle through and to get a good view of the snow on the ground below.

It’s very nice, and much like a ship’s cabin you learn to be judicious with what you bring in and overly neat in keeping the place organized or you’ll soon be overwhelmed by the clutter. I forgot my collapsible mesh laundry bag, which is about indispensible for corralling dirty clothes when we travel.  Whoda thunk that a laundry bag would make a difference in the quality of your stay?

If you’ve followed my earlier blogs, you might have noticed that there aren’t nearly as many pics on here as we normally take. This is unfortunate, given that we have a brand new video camera as well as our regular camera with us. Of course, I have no clue how to operate the new camera and there’s little likelihood that I’ll read the book, preferring to use the time honored method of randomly pushing buttons and swearing loudly when it doesn’t do what I want.

One of us, though (and it ain’t me) can usually upload pics from the camera to the internet.

That is, he can if he has the cable to mate the camera and the computer together. The same cables which are unfortunately bundled together and sitting on my desk at home. They should have been mailed to us yesterday, though, and we’ll hopefully get them tomorrow and can try to remedy that.

In the meantime, I’ll try to remember that a video camera also pics up audio and keep the swearing to a minimum, at least when I’m the videographer.