The Chelsea Hotel is one of the most famous hotels in New York City. It is located on 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea.

This 13-story dark red brick building was constructed in 1884 and was operated as a housing cooperative until 1905. In 1977, the hotel was the first in New York to be listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

In 1905, the Chelsea Hotel opened in what was then the tallest building in Manhattan. In 1912, the hotel housed survivors of the Titanic. Famous guests who stayed in the hotel’s rooms included Mark Twain, O. Henry, Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Édith Piaf. Due to its proximity to the docks, the hotel’s main clientele after opening were sailors looking to have fun with women, and it was here in 1912 that Titanic survivors were accommodated.

Writer William Burroughs worked on his novel "Naked Lunch" at the Chelsea, and Jack Kerouac wrote the "bible of the Beat Generation" — "On the Road" — on a 36-meter-long roll of paper.

"Chelsea Girls" is an experimental film by Andy Warhol, shot in the hotel. The film features the song "Chelsea Girl" by Nico, which was also the title of the singer’s first solo album. The most scandalous incident at the hotel occurred in 1978 when Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols killed his girlfriend Nancy. Today, there is no trace left of the crime scene: the room was divided into smaller rooms.

All respected rock stars knew their way to the Chelsea. In the 1960s, the hotel housed the most famous rock musicians of the time: Leonard Cohen lived in room 424, Bob Dylan composed music in room 211, and Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin threw parties in room 411.

Janis Joplin, or "Pearl" as her friends and colleagues called her, occupied the suite 411 at the Chelsea Hotel. In the spring of 1968, she met Leonard Cohen, who had just released his first album and lived in room 424, in the elevator — this meeting ended with a night together and Cohen’s song "Chelsea Hotel" (plus a version with an added verse, "Chelsea Hotel #2"). Cohen wrote the first lines in 1970 on a napkin in a Miami Beach restaurant as soon as he learned of Janis Joplin’s death: “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet; giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street.” In March 1972, the song was first performed in the form we know it today — as one of the main hits of the 1970s. Cohen publicly revealed that the song was a memory of a night with Janis Joplin at a concert in May 1976. Later, he regretted having boasted about it.

The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards once said that all the bellhops at the Chelsea were "licensed dealers"; he bought heroin there. Bob Dylan, who lived there after his divorce (a classic Chelsea story), used amphetamines. There he met Andy Warhol’s muse Edie Sedgwick, with whom he had a romance. At the hotel, he wrote the songs "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and "Sara." Local old ladies did not recognize Jimi Hendrix, a black man, as a rock star and made him carry shopping bags up to his room. Evictions from the Chelsea were extremely rare and only under extraordinary circumstances. Ethnochoreography pioneer Katherine Dunham, who usually rehearsed at home, was kicked out after she brought two lions home to create a "more realistic" atmosphere for rehearsals.

"This place is my spiritual home. But everyone is somehow surprised that I stay here and not in a five-star hotel," Clark once said in an interview with The New York Times. By that time, he was already a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a pioneer of science fiction, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, part of the so-called "big three" writers who shaped the genre. At the time of the interview, Clark was 82 years old, and it was indeed hard to imagine him at the Chelsea. But only for those who did not know the story behind one of his most famous works — the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." One of the most mysterious films in cinema history was entirely written in a Chelsea room. By the way, Patti Smith regularly sat under his door, dreaming of meeting the writer. Clark spent his free time in the 1960s by tormenting passersby under the hotel doors with a laser pointer he brought to Kubrick’s filming.

Playwright, prose writer, Pulitzer Prize winner, and multiple Tony Award recipient Arthur Miller moved into room 614 at the Chelsea after becoming Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband in 1961. In his memoir "After the Fall," he describes the hotel as the pinnacle of surrealism. (Fair enough: Salvador Dalí at least visited.) "This hotel does not belong to America. There are no vacuum cleaners here, no rules, and no shame."

The Chelsea was not only an art commune but also a refuge for broken hearts — artists moved there when they had nowhere else to go. (Until recently, it was common in New York to rent a room in a cheap hotel designed for long-term residents instead of an apartment for economic reasons.) In 1964, after his divorce, the Chelsea was graced by American couturier Charles James, whose dresses were worn by Diana Vreeland, Mona von Bismarck, and Marlene Dietrich. James approached the reception as a famous but bankrupt designer. He took three rooms on the sixth floor at once: room 618 was his workshop, 624 was both his workspace and bedroom, and 620 was an archive with sketches, patterns, photographs, and documents. He decorated the walls with magazine clippings, lists of plans and goals, and posters.

The Chelsea both fascinated and annoyed James — the hotel manager Stanley Bard, with whom Charles had a long correspondence, constantly received complaints about everyday problems. Sometimes the air conditioner was broken for seven weeks, causing a layer of soot to accumulate in the room. Sometimes water bugs infested the place. "I think it is NOT a very good idea to allow tribes of water bugs to take over the hotel and do nothing for several months. This morning, just getting out of bed, I noticed a very large bug had crawled into it. I assure you, I did not find this amusing." Charles’s suffering ended in 1978 when he died in his room from bronchopneumonia.

Madonna, then still Louise Ciccone, lived at the Chelsea in the 1980s, just when Gotham Records owner Camilla Barbon spotted potential stardom in the dancer and aspiring singer. About ten years later, Madonna would return to the Chelsea as a pop icon. She rented room 822 to shoot a series of photos for her The Sex Book, written under the alter ego of Miss Dita, inspired by the 1930s film legend Dita Parlo. Bright orange walls, a Victorian white marble fireplace — the setting became the backdrop for soft-porn and BDSM-themed stories at the level of high art. The shoots for The Sex Book were done by Steven Meisel and Fabien Baron, inspired by punk rock aesthetics and fashion photography idols — Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, and Robert Mapplethorpe (Mapplethorpe was a Chelsea resident before he was recognized as a genius). Besides Madonna, the book featured Isabella Rossellini, Naomi Campbell, rappers Big Daddy Kane, Vanilla Ice, and other leaders of pop and underground culture. The book included not only the Chelsea — the heroes also posed at the burlesque Gaiety Theater on Times Square, in Miami at Madonna’s house, on the streets, and on beaches.

Poet Dylan Thomas fell ill in room 205 after consuming 18 shots of whiskey; he was taken to the hospital and died. Charles Jackson, author of the bestseller "The Lost Weekend," also poisoned himself here.

Romantic relationships developed in the hotel rooms between Bob Dylan and Edie Sedgwick, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. After emigrating from Czechoslovakia, director Miloš Forman settled in this hotel.

Until his death at the age of 112, the oldest artist in the USA, Elphaus Cole, lived in the hotel.

The Polish-Israeli-American post-expressionist artist Pinchas Burstein, known by the pseudonym Marjan, lived and worked in the hotel.

The peak of the hotel’s bohemian fame came in the 1960s when it became a genuine hotbed of radicalism in art: One of the main Irish playwrights Brendan Behan, also an IRA militant who was imprisoned in the 1940s for storing explosives and shooting at police, languished here. The hotel was almost the headquarters of the Beats: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, the brilliant cynical comic artist Robert Crumb (creator of "Fritz the Cat"), robber, writer, and drug addict Herbert Huncke, prototype of the hero of the novel "Junky," written by another Chelsea citizen — William Burroughs. The Beats were replaced by rock radicals: Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, then the punk generation — starting with pioneers Patti Smith and Dee Dee Ramone.

In the 1970s, Andrei Voznesensky called the Chelsea anti-bourgeois, "the most absurd hotel in the world": “It looks like a huge train station from the 1910s, with cast-iron gallery railings — it even seems to smell of coal soot. Although, maybe it’s just a sweet forbidden smoke coming from the rooms. The elevators are always broken, there is little staff and few amenities, but that’s exactly what people pay for here. It’s a lifestyle of a whole social class concerned with the social restructuring of the world. Directors of underground films, protest stars, a shaved-headed Bakuninist in a motorcycle jacket, mulatto women in golden lamé pants worn on bare skin ride the elevator. Emeralds light up on their fingers as if they were unoccupied taxis.”

Although the Chelsea’s worldwide fame was brought by its permanent bohemian residents, the current hotel administration limits stays to 24 days.

At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, the premiere of Abel Ferrara’s documentary about the Chelsea Hotel and its residents took place.

Sources:

https://realty.rbc.ru/news/5c2220639a79472d99e282d0?from=copy

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Челси_(отель)

https://theblueprint.ru/culture/history/chelsea-hotel

https://hotelchelsea.com/history