West Twenty-seventh Street since 1905. It was founded in 1895 by its
present head, Dr. John L. Elliott, Senior Leader of the Society for Ethical
Culture and a descendant of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the abolitionist. Its modeL
tenement house, built in 1916 at 441 West Twenty-eighth Street, helped
to focus attention upon the need for adequate low-rent housing.

The Morgan Annex, New York Post Office, with its huge parcel-post
station, fills the block from Ninth to Tenth Avenue, between Twenty-
ninth and Thirtieth Streets. A railroad spur enters the western end of the
building at the third-floor level.

Hell's Kitchen and Vicinity

Area: 30th St. (9th to 12th Ave.) and 41st St. (8th to 9th Ave.) on the south to
59th St. (8th to 12th Ave.) on the north; from 12th Ave. east to 9th Ave. (30th
to 41st St.) and 8th Ave. (41st to 59th St.).

Freight yards, factories, garages, warehouses, stock pens, and tenements
today cover the area of Hell's Kitchen, a district that bears one of the most
lurid reputations in America. The neighborhood's proximity to Manhat-
tan's railroad and water terminals still fixes its industrial working-class char-
acter. Indeed the only characteristic of the traditional Hell's Kitchen that
has completely disappeared is the organized hoodlumism, which, according
to one authority, made the locality "one of the most dangerous areas on
the American continent." To the north is a drab region of tenements,
churches, factories, and garages deriving a little color from near-by Times
Square. Scattered throughout the district are modern apartment houses and
renovated brownstone dwellings.

Hell's Kitchen acquired its reputation as one of the toughest areas in
the city shortly after the Civil War. According to Herbert Asbury, who
recorded many exploits of Hell's Kitchen hoodlums in his book, The
Gangs of New York, the section deserved its notoriety. Its name, orig-
inally applied to a dive near Corlears Hook on the East Side, came from
the Hell's Kitchen Gang, organized in about 1868 by Dutch Heinrichs.
Although this gang specialized in raids on the Thirtieth Street yard of the
Hudson River Railroad (now part of the New York Central), its reper-
toire included extortion, breaking-and-entering, professional mayhem, and
highway robbery. It merged with the Tenth Avenue Gang, which had held
up and robbed a Hudson River Railroad express train, and for decades ter-
rorized the neighborhood. From its ranks rose the desperadoes who organ-
ized the Hudson Dusters and the Gophers.