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

Extract

Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894–1914 is a history of a turn-of-the-century New York City neighborhood, one keenly attuned to the patterns of daily life. But it is more than this. It is an exploration of how the physical geography of that particular place mattered, and of how people were (and, by implication, still are) shaped by the literal spaces they inhabit. This happens in the most mundane ways, of course: What are the conditions of one's housing, and how does that affect health, for example? Or, which way does someone walk to work or to the market? What do they pass? What impressions of their home do they form as a result? But in this book, Joseph J. Varga shows how residents were affected more deeply, and how Hell's Kitchen (the Middle West Side, in earlier years) taught them to think about themselves, their neighbors, and their relationship to the rest of the city. Indeed, Varga's largest theme, drawing upon the work of David Harvey (and elsewhere, Henri Lefebvre), is that both one's experience of citizenship and one's ideas about it are spatially determined, as the literal spaces we occupy instill in us messages about our power (or powerlessness), and our relative worth in the polity, in the economy, and in the culture.