HELL’S KITCHEN
N. B. When I first came to New York, and for years afterward, it was a whim of the New York newspapers to dub that region on the West Side which lies between Thirty-sixth and Forty-first Streets and Ninth Avenue and the Hudson River as Hell’s Kitchen. There was assumed to be operative there, shooting and killing at will, a gang of young roughs that for savagery and brutality was not to be outrivaled by any of the various savage groups of the city. Disturbances, murders, riots, were assumed to be common; the residents of this area at once sullen and tempestuous. Interested by the stark pictures of a slum life so often painted, I finally went to reside there for a period. What follows is from notes or brief pictures made at the time.
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It is nine o’clock of a summer’s evening. Approaching my place at this hour, suddenly I encounter a rabble issuing out of Thirty-ninth Street into Tenth Avenue. It is noisy, tempestuous, swirling. A frowsy-headed man of about thirty-eight, whose face is badly lacerated and bleeding and whose coat is torn and covered with dust, as though he had been rolling upon the ground, leads the procession. He is walking with that reckless abandon which characterizes the movements of the angry. A slatternly woman of doughy complexion follows at his heels. About them sways a crowd of uncombed and stribbly-haired men and women and children. In the middle of the street, directly on a line with the man whom the crowd surrounds, but, to one side and nearer the sidewalk walks another man, undersized, thickset and energetic, who seems to take a great interest in the crowd. Though he keeps straight ahead, like the others, he keeps turning and looking, as though he expected a demonstration of some sort. No word is spoken by either the man or the woman, and as the curious company passes along under the variable glows of the store-lamps, shop-keepers and store-dealers come out and make humorous comments, but seem to think it not worth while to follow. I join the procession, since this now relates to my interests, and finally shake an impish, black-haired, ten-year-old girl by the arm until she looks up at me.
“What’s the matter?”
“Aw, he hit him with a banister.”
“Who hit him?”
“Why, that man out there in the street.”
“What did he hit him for?”