Hell's Kitchen - Sizzling - NYTimes.com Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times Gotham West, a new rental complex between West 44th and West 45th Streets, shares a block with a Hell's Kitchen old-timer, a gas station. This is a view from 10th Avenue, looking west. In the race to develop the West Side of Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen can seem the tortoise to the Hudson Yards hare. Yet if Hudson Yards suddenly seems to be going up all at once, its neighbor to the north has been moving ahead in slow, deliberate steps, year after year. About a dozen residential projects are in the pipeline for the neighborhood - some finished, some underway and some in the planning stages. They include Gotham West, a rental complex with more than 1,200 apartments that recently opened on West 45th Street; 540West, a 114-unit condo under construction on West 49th Street; and, on West 50th, Stella Tower, a 51-unit sister building to the Walker Tower in Chelsea. The Chelsea version was named for its architect, Ralph Walker, and the one in Hell's Kitchen for his wife. These projects are being built in the area running from West 42nd to West 57th Street, and from Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River. When the name "Hell's Kitchen" gained currency in the 1800s, the neighborhood ran from 59th Street down into the 30s, west of Eighth Avenue, and was known for its gang violence and squalor. Various parts of the loosely defined area have since been called Clinton, Midtown West and Chelsea North. But despite the neighborhood's 21st-century respectability, Hell's Kitchen appears to have sticking power as a name. And for the most part, longtime residents have met the changes with tolerance. "We're really that melting pot they talk about in New York, lots of different ethnic groups, different incomes," said Elke Fears, who has lived in a stoop-fronted brownstone since 1983. It makes it interesting, and it makes it fun. Although Midtown next door is growing ever taller, Hell's Kitchen has preserved much of its low-slung look. Special zoning put in place in the 1970s prevents most buildings from rising more than seven stories on side streets, and more than 15 on the avenues, including Ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th. So to put up lucrative skyscrapers, developers generally went elsewhere. As a result, many Hell's Kitchen blocks have a 19th-century vibe. Trees shade intact four-story rowhouses, with corbels bracketing their roofs, and facades the color of chocolate frosting. Along other blocks, the skyline is at ground level: For decades, Hell's Kitchen was known, for better or worse, for its parking lots, like the one on 10th Avenue, from 47th to 48th Street, that today is home to Hell's Kitchen Park. Whatever the lots favored by Broadway-bound suburbanites in the past, chances are they have been taken over by new construction. A sizable part of the neighborhood is made up of affordable housing, some resulting from the rehabilitation of abandoned rowhouses. Among the large public projects are Manhattan Plaza on 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue, largely inhabited by artists; and Clinton Manor, on 51st Street near 10th Avenue, which has 241 apartments for Section 8 tenants. Some developers included below-market units in exchange for being allowed to erect bigger buildings. Retailers have taken an interest, too. Shops are planned for the Windermere, a shuttered 1881 apartment building at 10th Avenue and 57th that may, after years of delays, become a 200-room boutique hotel, said Mark Tress, the New Jersey developer who has owned it since 2009. These days, Ninth and 10th Avenues are a thicket of bars and restaurants, many of which cater to a gay clientele. On sidewalks where crack was once dealt openly, cafe tables are crammed in front of plate-glass windows or wide-open French doors. This month Gotham West Market, a supercharged food court at Gotham West, will open with eight mini-restaurants. All those beer taps may turn the area into a party zone on some evenings, but neighbors seem to understand that a certain amount of carousing comes with the territory. "Yes, it's edgy; yes, it's gritty, but it's on the cutting edge of the city," said Elliott Joseph, a principal of the Property Markets Group, which is developing Stella Tower with the JDS Development Group, the team that delivered the Walker Tower. But as gentrification takes over the entire city, you have to look for neighborhoods on the cutting edge. But it's not as if Hell's Kitchen's commercial legacy, which includes lumberyards, auto dealerships and recording studios, had disappeared. Verizon, an occupant of the Stella building, will retain several lower-level floors, just as it does at Walker Tower, also a former Verizon building. Views from the 18-story Stella Tower will sweep across some of those protected low-slung blocks, and 40 percent of the apartments will have outdoor space. Wood-burning fireplaces will grace some residences, as will concrete kitchen counters and radiant-heat master-bath floors. But although the Walker Tower recently set what could be a downtown record for a condo when its penthouse went into contract for around $50 million, Stella Tower's pricing will be lower. An earlier version of this article misstated the cross streets for 540 West 49th Street. It is between 10th and 11th Avenues, not 11th and 12th.