NYC – Chelsea: Hotel Chelsea
Image by wallyg
The Hotel Chelsea, built in 1883 by George M. Smith to the design of Hubert, Pirsson & Co., is one of the few remaining Great Victorian Gothic apartment houses, which once adorned the city. The Hotel welcomes guests, but is primarily known for its long term residents–many of whom hold prestigious rank in the art, music and literary worlds.
The eleven-story red-brick building that now houses the Hotel Chelsea was built in 1883 as a private apartment cooperative that opened in 1884. It was the tallest building in the city until 1899, at a time when Chelsea was the center of New York’s Theater District. However, within a few years the combination of economic worries and the relocation of the theaters bankrupted the Chelsea cooperative. In 1905, the building was purchased and opened as a hotel. Since 1946, the hotel has been managed by the Bard family, and until 2007 was run by Stanley Bard who took over as managing director from his father in 1955.
The most notable feature of the building is the succession, tier on tier, of horizontal iron balconies, richly decorated with leaves and flowers opened onto by French doors. A central towerlike section of the front has a high, pyramidal slate-roof, flanked on each side by enormous chimneys. Complementing this central feature ar eprojecting wings at each end of the building, adorned at their tops by large-pointed arch windows.
The hotel is known for celebrity accomplishments and infamy. Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while staying at the Chelsea. William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch here. Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and The Price here. Dylan Thomas died here of alcohol poisoning on November 4, 1953. Charles R. Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, committed suicide in his room on September 21, 1968. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols may have stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death on October 12, 1978. Painter & ethnomusicologist Harry Smith lived and died at the Chelsea in Room 328. The painter Alphaeus Cole lived there for 35 years until his death at age 112, the world’s oldest living person at that time, in 1988. Charles James, credited with being America’s first couturier, moved in in 1964 and died of pneumonia here in 1978. The hotel has provided long term residence to, among others, Mark Twain, O. Henry, William S. Burroughs, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Simone de Beauvoir, Robert Oppenheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bill Landis, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Bukowski, Stanley Kubrick, Shirley Clarke, Cyndi Coyne, Mitch Hedberg, Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper, Uma Thurman, Elliot Gould, Jane Fonda, Gaby Hoffmann, Pete Doherty, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Dee Dee Ramone, Henri Chopin, John Cale, Édith Piaf, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Christo, Arman, Diego Rivera, Robert Crumb, Willem de Kooning, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Richard Hell, Ryan Adams, Rufus Wainwright, Abdullah Ibrahim/Sathima Bea Benjamin, and Anthony Kiedis. Several survivors of the Titanic stayed for some time in this hotel as it is a short distance from Pier 54 where the Titanic was supposed to dock. Andy Warhol directed The Chelsea Girls, his 1966 film about his Factory regulars and their lives at the hotel, here.
The Hotel Chelsea was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1966.
National Register #77000958 (1977)
