The once-seedy heart of New York City was once called the Tenderloin. Police Captain Alexander Williams allegedly coined the term in the late 1870s. This district was on the West Side of Manhattan from 24th Street to 40th Street. It was east of Hell's Kitchen (between the Hudson and 8th Avenue, from 23rd to 59th).
The raffish reputation of the Tenderloin's 1890s bordellos, repeatedly raided by Anthony Comstock's "vice squad" was sentimentally recreated in the somewhat kitsch 1960 musical Tenderloin, from the Fiorello! team: music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, the book by the old master George Abbott and Jerome Weidman, based on a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams.
By 1914, middle-class Blacks from the Tenderloin district started moving to Harlem which had been primarily white.
It became an industrial area, but since the 1970s, with gentrification, the old Tenderloin's Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen (or Clinton) sections became increasingly residential again.
External links
- [1] Origin of Name.
- Tenderloin
- [2] Blacks start to leave for Harlem