Where the theatre crowd actually eats, two blocks from Times Square and about a third of the price. Ninth Avenue is one of the best eating streets in Manhattan.
The name
Nobody is certain. The most repeated story has two policemen watching a riot on West 39th Street, the rookie saying the place was hell itself and the veteran replying that hell was mild — this was Hell’s Kitchen. Whether that happened or not, the name described a real thing: a nineteenth-century district of Irish dockworkers, tenements, gang violence and slaughterhouses that was among the poorest in the city.
Estate agents spent the 1990s trying to rename it Clinton, after De Witt Clinton Park. Almost nobody uses that. Hell’s Kitchen won, partly because it sounds better and partly because New Yorkers resist being told what things are called.
Eating
This is the point of the neighbourhood for most visitors, and it is genuinely excellent value.
Ninth Avenue from 42nd to 55th is a continuous run of restaurants covering more or less everything: Thai, Ethiopian, Greek, Mexican, Peruvian, Afghan, Italian and a good deal of it family-run and inexpensive. The Ninth Avenue International Food Festival in May closes twenty blocks of it.
Restaurant Row, West 46th between Eighth and Ninth, is the pre-theatre strip. Tell them your curtain time and they will pace the meal to it. It is more expensive and more reliable than the avenue.
Tenth Avenue has the newer and more ambitious openings.
Gotham West Market on Eleventh at 45th is a small food hall with a couple of very good stalls.
What else
The Intrepid Museum at Pier 86 — the aircraft carrier with the Concorde and the Space Shuttle — is at the western edge.
Hudson River Park runs the whole waterfront with a bike path, piers to sit on, and the trapeze school at Pier 40.
Off-Broadway theatres cluster on West 42nd between Ninth and Tenth in a row of small converted houses called Theatre Row, where the tickets are a third the price and the work is often better.
Hudson Yards and The Edge are at the south-west corner.
Staying here
A sensible alternative to Midtown proper: you are a ten-minute walk from the theatres, the hotels are cheaper, and you get a neighbourhood with food and bars in it rather than an office district. The blocks west of Tenth Avenue are quiet at night.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.