Neighborhoods

Midtown West

Hell's Kitchen, also known as Clinton and Midtown West, is a neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City located between 34th Street in the south, 59th Street in the north, Eighth Avenue in the east and the Hudson River to the west.^[1] The area provides transportation, hospital and warehouse infrastructure support to the Midtown Manhattan business district. Its gritty reputation kept real estate prices below those of most other areas of Manhattan until the early 1990s; rents have increased dramatically since and are above the Manhattan average as of April 2014.^[2]

Once a bastion of poor and working-class Irish Americans, Hell's Kitchen's proximity to Midtown has changed it over the last three decades of the 20th century and into the new millennium. The 1969 edition of the City Planning Commission's Plan for New York City reported that development pressures related to its Midtown location were driving people of modest means from the area. Today, the area is gentrifying.^[3][4][5]

The rough-and-tumble days on the West Side figure prominently in Damon Runyon's stories and is the childhood home of Marvel Comics' Daredevil. Being near to both Broadway theatres and Actors Studio training school, the area has long been a home to actors learning and practicing their craft.