A new wave of loyal residents and a heavenly location near business and theater have given this western Midtown neighborhood a new lease on life.

The neighborhood sometimes referred to as Clinton (for the city’s 19th century governor DeWitt Clinton), located between Eigth Avenue and the Hudson River from 34th to 59th streets, experienced some serious changes as the 20th century became the 21st. The birthplace of The Godfather author Mario Puzo and Sylvester Stallone was a rough and gritty page in the New York storybook from the 1920s through the ’80s. Irish, Italian and Puerto Rican immigrants moved here to work on the Hudson River docks, slaughterhouses, lumberyards, and railroad. Each claimed the neighborhood, and clashes between ethnic gangs were the stuff of legend—Hell’s Kitchen was the setting for the late 1950s gang romance West Side Story. During the prohibition era, the area was dotted with speakeasies run by gangsters like Owney (the Killer) Madden, and two generations of Irish gangsters known as the Westies worked the neighborhood well into the 1980s.

By the late 1980s, then-federal-prosecutor Rudolph W. Giuliani helped put the area’s mob bosses in the clink, and the transformation of Times Square from an X- to a G-rated zone in the 1990s paved the way for a Kitchen makeover. Blocks of old tenements were razed and condominium towers and community gardens grew. The crime-ridden waterfront became part of Hudson River Park. Some of the old neighborhood’s flavor has thrived: Actors, aided in the past by the area’s cheap rents, still live here to be close to Broadway theaters. Eighth Avenue’s “Restaurant Row” offers great ethnic food, though it now shares the district with new cafes and bakeries—like Sullivan Street Bakery and Amy’s Bread—as well as new restaurants, shops and bars that welcome residents as tree-lined streets keep the neighborhood sheltered from the nearby Midtown hustle-and-flow.