Chelsea Hotel

Chelsea Hotel

Variety has a review of a movie about the Chelea Hotel. It starts with a bit of history:

There are many layers to the mystique of the Chelsea Hotel. Long before it became a hipster hangout, the 12-story, 250-room fortress, built in the 1880s, was home to Mark Twain (though come to think of it, maybe he was the original hipster). In the ’50s, the Chelsea played host to assorted literary figures, the first of whom to lend it a dissolute aura was Dylan Thomas, who was living the lush life in room 205 when he became ill and died in 1953. The beats moved in (Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac), and so did Arthur Miller after he divorced Marilyn Monroe and Arthur C. Clarke while he was writing “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

But it was Andy Warhol who put the stamp of underground cachet on the Chelsea when he shot his three-and-a-half-hour multi-screen ramble “The Chelsea Girls” there in 1966. By the time that Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe took up residence in 1969, they already saw themselves as the next generation in the Chelsea tradition of bohemian squalor. The coolest musicians on the planet lived at the Chelsea (Joplin, Dylan, Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Dee Dee Ramone), often doing the coolest drugs, a trend that culminated, and imploded, in 1978, when Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen used the place as their own personal heroin den, and Nancy Spungen died there, probably as the result of a botched suicide pact.

I've heard of most of the people mentioned, all except Nancy Spungen. Wikipedia has a page about her and it's a bit of a horror story.

The review calls describes the building as "drop dead gorgeous". Um, I don't think so.

Chelsea Hotel

I would describe it as a gothic horror. I will grant that it does have character, something the modern glass walled buildings don't have.

The Chelsea Hotel in 1884. (Cornelia Santomenna archives)

The place has been there a long time.