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

Abstract

Reviews the book, Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894-1914 by Joseph J. Varga (2013). Varga's study of the social production of the Middle West Side in Progressive-Era New York City is an extended explication of one of the major arguments in urban studies: that urbanites make their own city but not under conditions of their choosing. The book is also a thoroughly researched application of contemporary urban theory to historical material. Intricately combing through newspaper stories, government analyses, social workers' reports, planning proposals, photographic collections, and other archival sources, Varga exhumes the multiple discourses, practices, and institutions that shaped everyday life in this poor and working-class pocket of industrial Manhattan. Drawing on Lefebvrean concepts like spatial practice and representational space, Varga documents how the Middle West Side and its marginalized inhabitants became objects both of fascination and revulsion by reformers, planners, newspapermen, and other assorted middle-class outsiders. This book is a solid contribution to urban studies and a welcome addition to the sociological literature on New York City. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)