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hotel_chelsea's Journal
Account Created on 17 April 2004 (#2870304) Last updated on 7 April 2013 Gift
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A rest stop for rare individuals
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This is a community dedicated to the Chelsea Hotel. We're just started, bear with us.
"A building, 12-story brick, with brownstone trimmings, flat for 40 families, 175 x 86, mansard, brick, and news patent roof, cost $300,000; owner George M. Smith"
--Real Estate Record and Guide January 20, 1883
Thus was the Hotel Chelsea, New York's first co-operative apartment complex, introduced into the city's fierce rental food chain. An excerpt from the March 29th, 1884 Record and Guide betrays the optimism of the experiment's earliest participants: "The owners of the various apartments do not think that running expenses will cost them anything, as the stores on the ground floor & the two upper stories are retained for tenants, so as to bring in an income." In addition to the points enumerated in the Real Estate Record and Guide, the building included wrought-iron balconies, apartments of one to seven rooms (built to the purchaser's specifications), high ceilings, fire and sound-proof walls, wood-burning fireplaces, and private penthouses. A unique iron staircase, constructed with a wrought-iron balustrade and mahogany banister, ran (and still runs) from the lobby to the twelfth floor.
At the time of the Chelsea's inception, 23rd street served as a fleeting prototype of what would later become the quintessential thoroughfare of American theater, Broadway. Like the Bowery and 14th Street before it, 23rd Street's golden age as a theater strip would pass, but in the late 19th Century the Chelsea was in the center, with the Opera House Palace and Pike's Opera House (24th Street and 8th Avenue) down the block and Proctor's Theater ("continuous daily vaudeville") opening across 23rd Street. It was not until January of 1893 that this began to change, with the establishment of The Empire--Broadway's first proper theater--near 40th Street uptown. As New York historian Lloyd Morris has noted, "nobody realized that the opening of the Empire marked the beginning of a new theatrical era...yet it ushered in the Twentieth Century."
The relocation took several years, but its process ineluctably altered the social landscape of the city. Stripped of its patina of glamour, 23rd Street became a playground for real estate developers and the forces of industrialized commerce. And so the Chelsea, once and impervious stronghold of Opulence, also succumbed to the uglier forces of the market. The financial panics of 1893 and 1903, combined with the rising costs of urban life, bankrupted the Chelsea co-operative and forced the relocation of the original tenants. By 1905, the Chelsea had been sold and reorganized as a hotel.
Thus ended one grand experiment and began another, as the Chelsea Hotel began its life as a home to writers, artists, and urban transients of every variety.
222 West 23rd St
New York City, NY 10011
General:(212) 243-3700
Fax: (212) 675-5531
Managed by
sacrilegend _skink abstraction, alchoholism, andy warhol, art, arthur b. davies, arthur c. clarke, arthur miller, behind the scenes, ben lucian burman, bernard heidsick, bob dylan, bobby neuwirth, bohemianism, brendan behan, brion gysin, burlesque, celebrity deaths, charles jackson, chelsea girls, chelsea hotel, chelsea hotel #2, chelsea walls, chloe webb, christo, claes oldenberg, claudio edinger, courtney love, creating, deaths, decadence, dee dee ramone, dennis hopper, depeche mode, depravity, diego rivera, donald sutherland, dylan thomas, eccentricity, edgar lee masters, edie sedgewick, edith piaf, edward caswell, eve tanguey, famous groupies, film, frank wren, gaby hoffman, gary oldman, george kleinsinger, gerald busby, gert schiff, gregory corso, groupies, harry smith, hart crane, henri cartier-bresso, henri chopin, heroin, high-end sleazy fetish films, hotel chelsea, hotel chelseaness, ivan passer, jackson pollock, jake baker, james t. ferrell, jane fonda, janis joplin, jasper johns, jean tinguely, jersey lily, jim carroll, jim dine, jimi hendrix, joan osborne, john houseman, john simon ritchie, john sloan, jon secada, joni mitchell, julius robert oppenheimer, junkies, katherine dunham, larry rivers, leo katz, leonard cohen, lillian russell, lily langtry, manhattan, mark mitchum, mark twain, maurice girodias, milos forman, modern art, moondog, naked lunch, nancy spungen, nelson algren, new york, nico, norman rubbington, o. henry, obscurity, opulence, patti smith, poetry, quentin crisp, r.k. narayan, recluses, richard r. lingeman, robert crumb, robert flaherty, robert mapplethorpe, roderick gheka, ryan adams, sam shepard, sarah bernhardt, sherwood anderson, shirley clarke, sid & nancy, sid and nancy, sid vicious, surrealism, tennessee williams, the atomic bomb, the chelsea, the chelsea hotel, the darkside of film, theodore drieser, things named chelsea, thomas wolfe, ultra violet, underground, virgil thomson, viva, viva auder, vladimir nabokov, voodoo, whiskey, whores, willem de kooning, william s. burroughs
