Hell's Kitchen;: The roaring days of New York's wild West Side

This book was published in the late 1950s and gives a colourful account of a district that, the author writes, basically disappeared in the 1950s due to the construction of a major highway. Hell's Kitchen was vicious even by the rough standards of pre-public housing New York, and contained such violent gangs as the Hudson Dusters, who were a terror to the local police force. Gangsters such as Owney Madden cut their teeth in Hell's Kitchen, but so did Alice Faye, who later found film fame. This book is long out of print, and should be re-printed, as was that other similar work, Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York, just a few years ago.