Since a renaming campaign that began in over 50 years ago, some things have officially come off the menu in Hell’s Kitchen—grit and squalor, gang bivouacs, dire poverty. In 1959, the Manhattan neighborhood stretching from 34th to 59th Street west of 8th Avenue attempted an image makeover when grisly gang violence took the life of two young boys and generated waves of negative media coverage. That year it was alternatively named Clinton—but not unanimously.
Artists and residents in the community have argued name-politics since the beginning. Where HK has a plucky cachet, Clinton rolls of the tongue with glass sterility. Is the neighborhood a niche for Bohemians, or young urban professionals? Is graffiti art or blight? Are high-rises the future? Technical name grumbling still fills the air, but any stroll through the warehouse-y neighborhood will reveal a juxtaposition of both worlds.
Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen is burning up these days as a host of new construction condo developments have helped the once warehouse-full neighborhood earn its status as one of the most in-demand neighborhoods in Manhattan real estate. Hell’s Kitchen is saying goodbye to old patches of cement meant for parking lots and boarded-up buildings that waste space, and those browsing 
