The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Bounded on the south by 34th Street, on the north by 59th, and stretching from 8th Avenue west to the Hudson River, few neighborhoods have contributed more to the saga of New York City street life than Hell’s Kitchen. Along the neighborhood’s eastern flank stands Times Square, the city’s world-renowned theater district, with its staggering array of Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres, restaurants, and movie palaces—not to mention a thriving drug, pornography, and prostitution trade. To the west, the Hudson River and the waterfront, once the most lucrative cargo and passenger port in the United States and an unending source of income for racketeers.
    A number of popular legends concerning the origin of the name “Hell’s Kitchen” have now become part of the city’s permanent record. Some say it came from a German couple named Heil who owned a diner popular with local dockworkers in the post-Civil War years. Somehow Heil’s name was mispronounced as Hell, with Heil’s Kitchen thus becoming Hell’s Kitchen.
    Another has it that two Irish cops, one a veteran and the other a rookie, stood watching a small riot on West 39th Street. “This place is hell itself,” the rookie is supposed to have said.
    “Hell’s a mild climate,” responded the veteran. “This is Hell’s Kitchen, no less.”
    Whatever the origins of its name, there have always been certain inalienable traditions in Hell’s Kitchen, traditions that grew out of the neighborhood’s reputation as a cauldron of urban activity. At their best, these traditions have produced the cream of a proud and thriving metropolis. Doctors, priests, politicians, scientists, judges, athletes. People who used their working-class roots as the foundation for a life of compassion, service, and achievement.
    But over the decades, as Hell’s Kitchen was buffeted by forces that would shape and reshape the city, the neighborhood became known for another kind of tradition—a tradition of gangsterism. This was the tradition inherited by Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Spillane and the others who now found themselves caught up in the Coonan/Spillane Wars. It was a rich tradition, proudly cultivated by successive generations of tough guys, with a lineage rooted deep in the soil of New York City’s past.
    At the turn of the century, the area was largely an Irish and German enclave. Its most dominant physical features were the noisy 9th Avenue elevated railway, which carried more passengers than any railway line in the city, and the Hudson River Railroad, which carried freight and livestock along 11th Avenue, or “Death Avenue” as it was known to most West Siders because of the dust, congestion, and dangerous rail traffic.
    In 1910, a privately funded report by a group of social workers painted a graphic picture of the area at its most wretched. Hell’s Kitchen, they wrote, is characterized by “dull, square, monotonous ugliness, much dirt, and a great deal of despair.” Their account included a description of what life was like for young kids, who spent most of their time on the bustling cobblestoned streets hawking newspapers, fighting, picking pockets, swimming in the Hudson River, or flying pigeons from tenement roofs.
    There was a closeness within the community, however, that evaded the social workers. Because of their proximity to the docks and railroad lines, the people of Hell’s Kitchen felt as if they were constantly under siege from transient forces, and they reacted accordingly. Those who stayed put cultivated a fierce loyalty to the neighborhood as protection against the outside world. The area’s most prominent social institutions—the church, the political clubhouse, the neighborhood saloon—were more than just gathering places. They were fortresses of stability in the midst of what was largely a migrant community.
    Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, by far the most common form of activity for a young male was