Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894–1914 by Joseph J. Varga (review)

This is an ambitious and provocative study of an infamous New York City working-class neighborhood and place in urban reform politics. It is ambitious because it seeks to contribute both to the historical field and to social as well as spatial theory. It is provocative in that it presents itself as an unprecedented space-centered account of class and reform during the Progressive Era.

Hell’s Kitchen, a west midtown district of Manhattan, was a site of manufacturing (of carpets and pianos, for example) and shipping (the Hudson River piers) and home of immigrant working-class families. Its name expressed its reputation for vice and crime and recurrent race and ethnic riots. For this reason, Hell’s Kitchen drew the attention of progressive reformers, who, among other measures, sought to improve housing conditions and build a park. Meanwhile, the area’s residents forged their identities by both accommodating and opposing elite discourses. The author’s key contention is that space-based perceptions and practices underwrote all of these aspects—outsiders’ stigmatization of the area, progressives’ environmental reforms, and residents’ identities and wants—and thus are central to understanding urban politics during the period.

Hell’s Kitchen’s reputation was grounded in spatial terms. Abusive police practices, buttressed by vague and arbitrary statutes of “disorderly conduct,” were justified in terms of their victims’ class, ethnicity, and gender, but they were triggered in specific criminalized spaces, such that a woman of certain “suspicious” appearance waiting in a given street for her boyfriend would find herself arrested for prostitution. Such “frozen zones,” defined by the author as geographically delimited areas of lawlessness, vice, and danger, were sanctioned by New York City’s political economy and machine politics. More than one’s identity, say, as a worker, woman, or immigrant, it was the “physical location of work and residence” that marked a person’s status and vulnerability to state action (118).

Turn-of-the-century progressives also viewed the area through spatial lenses as they postulated a change in its physical conditions as the main means to obtain moral and social improvements. Their efforts centered on the construction of model tenement houses, such as the Emerson Flats, and the creation of the new DeWitt Clinton Park (as well as efforts to standardize and professionalize the police forces), both of which, the author contends, proved futile because of entrenched real estate interests and capitalist market speculation. More central to the book’s argument, progressives based their reforms on utopian visions of perfect spaces, or “reformscapes,” that reflected their “nearly slavish desire to re-create cities” in accordance with European capitals (134). Moreover, these notions had little to do with the needs or wants of Hell’s Kitchen residents. Like urban planners, then and now, progressive reformers meant to impose a static and schematic notion of community onto living communities: “Community could not be created, nor place made, by proper planning and provision” (161).

The approximately quarter of a million working-class ethnics who lived in Hell’s Kitchen (in 1900) responded with their own spatial practices and visions. On the one hand, they assumed the assigned role as the “dangerous classes,” “question[ing] their own position as citizens within the larger culture, and . . . fall[ing] back upon the racial, ethnic, class, and gendered solidarities” (119). On the other hand, they resisted and questioned these stigmas and appropriated the area’s spaces to their own advantage. They did so not by crafting insulated, romanticized “places”—a concept furthered by some urban geographers and rejected by the author—but rather by continually contesting elite (as in the police or progressives) spatial notions. Also, with regard to their internal organization, residents relied on spatial markers more than other signs of identity; for example, the “turf” of youth...