Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894-1914

by Joseph J. Varga

Overview

Hell’s Kitchen is among Manhattan’s most storied and studied
neighborhoods. A working-class district situated next to the West
Side’s middle- and upper-class residential districts, it has long attracted
the focus of artists and urban planners, writers and reformers.
Now, Joseph Varga takes us on a tour of Hell’s Kitchen
with an eye toward what we usually take for granted: space, and,
particularly, how urban spaces are produced, controlled, and contested
by different class and political forces.
Varga examines events and locations in a crucial period in the
formation of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, the Progressive Era,
and describes how reformers sought to shape the behavior and experiences
of its inhabitants by manipulating the built environment.
But those inhabitants had plans of their own, and thus ensued
a struggle over the very spaces—public and private, commercial
and personal—in which they lived. Varga insightfully considers the
interactions between human actors, the built environment, and
the natural landscape, and suggests how the production of and
struggle over space influence what we think and how we live. In
the process, he raises incisive questions about the meaning of
community, citizenship, and democracy itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583673508
Publisher:	Monthly Review Press
Publication date:	05/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Joseph Varga is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Indiana University. Before receiving his doctorate from the New School for Social Research, Varga was a truck driver, forklift operator, and service worker, among other things. He is a long-time labor activist and former Teamster shop steward, and has worked for the IBEW and New York State Working Families Party.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Introduction: A Death in the Kitchen 11

Chapter 1 Space as History 19

Hell's Kitchen 19

Uneven Geographic Development 27

The Production of Space 31

Implications 37

Chapter 2 Restructuring Progressives 45

Progressive Vision and Visibility 49

Visibility and Occlusion 61

Representational Space and Performance 74

Chapter 3 When Hell Froze Over 87

Policing the Boundaries 103

Chapter 4 Housing and Visible Spaces 121

Imagined Spatial Communities 127

Kitchen Space 139

Chapter 5 Spatial Economies 165

Working in the City 169

The Laboring Body 180

Chapter 6 Hell, Death, and Urban Politics 203

The Restructured Spatial Container 207

Self-Perception and Citizenship 216

Conclusion: The Spatial Production of Desire 231

The Future of Cities 235

Bibliography 239

Notes 247

Index 267