Daredevil and Going Home Again
Can this Netflix series work if the neighborhood that defines it doesn’t exist anymore?
By KARRA SHIMABUKURO
When I first moved to New York City in 2000, I made a beeline for the Kevin St. James Bar & Restaurant, located in Hell’s Kitchen at 46th and 8th.
No, I wasn’t an alcoholic. A friend of mine had been on vacation in the city to see Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh. She stood outside to get his autograph and afterward, when he got in a cab, she followed him.
She lost him in Hell’s Kitchen but walked into a bar and asked if he had been there. The bartender said yes, and the two sat and talked for a while. When I moved to NYC, my friend told me to check out the bar.
My Neighborhood Bar
I first walked into the Kevin St. James during the day. The bartender asked me what brought me in, and I told him the story. His response: “Oh, Sarah, with the curly hair?”
That was Kevin, the owner — he said his partner, James, got the St. in front of his name because he was “the money man.” I had just found my neighborhood bar.
I always spend more time with the staff than the customers, so it’s no surprise I became friends with Kevin and his manager, George (above right). Later there was Peter, the Irish bartender.
In 2000/2001, the Kevin St. James reflected larger changes in the neighborhood. The clientele was more upscale on some nights, several more suits than you’d expect to see in Hell’s Kitchen. But the largest population at the dive was always the people of Hell’s Kitchen itself: the firefighters and (still) mostly Irish population.
Kevin’s dad had been a bartender in the neighborhood, and this bar was his dream. He was a strong supporter of the firefighters, way before 9/11 — when it became patriotic and trendy to do so.
I left NYC in 2004 and was sad to hear the Kevin St. James closed. I have no pictures of my time there since that was a time before cataloging one’s in pictures was de rigeur. But I was able to find a few images that capture some of the magic. The book Past Redemption mentions the bar, and David Arquette filmed a photo shoot there just before it closed. Memories float around here and there.
Apparently, the whole block was bought out and turned into condos for rich folks. Kevin has moved to a new bar, and that makes me happy. But I mourn the passing of the Kevin St. James because it was so representative of a neighborhood and a time period.
I was reminded of all of this as I watched Daredevil (2015– ) on Netflix.
Daredevil, Place, and Time
Perhaps more than other comics, Daredevil is innately tied not just to place, but also to time. As my friends watched — some binging, some rationing themselves — questions about place came up. I had one such conversation with Kevin Ferguson, who incidentally wrote a piece for The Outtake on what westerns really look like.
Our conversation started with a discussion of Daredevil’s stereotypical villains: Chinese drug lords, Russian mafia, Japanese Yakuza. And I wondered if this was a gesture to how delineated the neighborhoods of NYC are/were due to ethnicity.
For New Yorkers, past and present, there are always critiques of movies or television shows set in NYC. Kevin and I both confessed confusion over Daredevil’s opening scene at the docks, as the waterfront is not typically associated with Hell’s Kitchen.
We both marked the shooting location as probably Silvercup Studios due to the exterior shots and what was in the background. And we talked about how it didn’t really look like Hell’s Kitchen — or any NYC neighborhood, for that matter. And I think it’s because Hell’s Kitchen isn’t Hell’s Kitchen anymore.
Daredevil explains this as a part of the aftermath from The Avengers, when a chunk of NYC is destroyed in the invasion/showdown. In fact, this rebuilding is key to the series’ main plot and the motivation and actions of the series’ villian, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). As Kevin pointed out, it’s hard not to read this through a post-9/11 lens, when my city is still rebuilding and remaking itself.
But here’s the problem. As much as I loved Daredevil (and rationed episodes to stretch out the love as long as I could), watching the show got me thinking — about the Kevin St. James and Hell’s Kitchen and whether or not you could go home again. Or rather, it got me thinking about whether one could still tell a story about Hell’s Kitchen if Hell’s Kitchen didn’t exist anymore.
Sidestepping Issues of Erasure
Daredevil first appeared in 1964. Hell’s Kitchen was different then, known as much for its Irish, working-class population as for the violence gracing its streets. Its location, before the Disneyfication of Times Square, was a large part of this: hookers still walked the streets, as did criminals.
To be fair, I’m not the first person to suggest that the Hell’s Kitchen in the show is not the Hell’s Kitchen of today. But this is my question:
Can Daredevil still be Daredevil if the neighborhood that anchors and defines the series and character doesn’t exist anymore?
It’s not the post-Avengers rebuild that makes this difficult. Rather it’s the fact that the long-term residents of Hell’s Kitchen — Irish, Puerto Ricans, and many working-class people — have been priced out of their generational homes.
On Daredevil, Ms. Cardenas’ being pushed out of her home by Tully and then Fisk is reflective of what has happened in reality over the last decade. The people who once made and defined the neighborhood are no longer there. And even if they wanted to be, they couldn’t afford to anymore.
A similar thing has happened in other NYC neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and some neighborhoods in Queens. Rich, entitled people have spread out from Manhattan and displaced generations of residents.
Again, I enjoyed Daredevil, especially Charlie Cox as Matt Murdoch. And I’m already rewatching, catching things I missed the first time around. In the end, the show sidesteps these issues of erasure.
The series is critical of people who’d remove older generations (represented by the villianous Fisk). Yet it’s set in our current time, so these people were removed a while ago. With Season 2 greenlit, it will be interesting to see how the show deals with and integrates the neighborhood into the narrative as well as how it positions its new and continuing villains.
So how are we supposed to read Daredevil? Does the show illustrate nostalgia for an older time? Does it reframe it to comment on post 9/11? Or is it just ignoring this situation and overlaying the Daredevil narrative over the now, without considering these larger issues?
All I know is that the show is great, I miss the Kevin St. James, and as much as I wish I could, I can’t go home again.
Originally published at Scholarly Medieval Madness on April 20, 2015. Daredevil images: Chris Pendergraft and Epic Times.
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