Hotel Chelsea

thumb|The Hotel Chelsea The Hotel Chelsea (also known as the Chelsea Hotel and the Chelsea), located in Chelsea, Manhattan, at 222 West 23rd Street (Manhattan) 23rd Street, is a hotel famous for the many writers, musicians, artists, entertainers, and eccentrics who lived there. The hotel, built from 1883 to 1884, was originally a housing cooperative. In 1905 it was converted to an apartment hotel. The David H. Knott Knott Hotels Corporation took over the hotel in 1921 and managed it until 1942, when David Bard bought the bankrupt hotel. Julius Krauss and Joseph Gross joined Bard as owners in 1947. After David Bard died in 1964, his son Stanley Bard (1934–2017) operated it for 43 years. The Krauss and Gross families took over the hotel in 2007 and were involved in numerous tenant disputes before the Chelsea closed (as a hotel) for a major renovation in 2011 — although several dozen tenants continued to live there. After two changes of ownership, BD Hotels acquired the property in 2016, and the Chelsea reopened in 2022. Quotes ... At the hotel on Twenty-third Street, famously rundown and louche—the Last Bohemia for the Final Beatniks, our own Chateau Marmont, where Dylan Thomas drank and Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and Leonard Cohen wore (or didn’t; people argue) his famous blue raincoat, and Sid Vicious killed (or didn’t; they argue that, too) Nancy Spungen—the renovators and gentrifiers have arrived. ...But, unusually, in this case the new owners have a sense of what they own, and of its past, and so the Chelsea Hotel’s passage is being celebrated rather than hushed up: this week, a group of young players is reviving the play “Cowboy Mouth (play) Cowboy Mouth,” by Patti Smith and Sam Shephard, which tells the story of their love affair in the hotel, with the play put on by a group called Young Artists at The Chelsea right there in the building itself. Even more unusually, the senior citizens of the place are mostly safe. Owing to some decent social activism within the hotel’s community, the long-time residents have been allowed to stay on past the reopening—paying the rents they paid, and remaining the institutional memory of an eccentric but essential institution. Adam Gopnik, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-last-living-bohemian-in-chelsea-tells-all The New Yorker The Last Living Bohemian in Chelsea Tells All June 17, 2015 For the past decade, the residence hotel on West 23rd Street, a New York character unto itself, has been suspended in a dreary state of endless construction, with a rotating cast of developers struggling to spin this oddity into an upscale boutique hotel.Even as the pandemic decimates the city’s economy, closing scores of hotels, restaurants and stores, and leaving tens of thousands of New Yorkers unable to pay their rent, the 12-story Chelsea continues to exist in a world unto itself, one that seems to host a seemingly endless cage match where the building’s roughly 50 remaining tenants spar with one another or with the landlord who, in turn, battles with the city. ...The latest plot twist came in January, when the city dropped a lengthy investigation of tenant harassment that had halted construction for two and a half years. With that obstacle removed, the Chelsea’s owners, Ira Drukier, Richard Born and Sean MacPherson, known for their trendy boutique hotels like the Ludlow, the Maritime Hotel Maritime and the The Bowery Hotel Bowery, resumed work. They plan to open the Chelsea to guests by the end of the year. Ronda Kayser, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/nyregion/chelsea-hotel-nyc.html How a Legendary New York Hotel Became a Battleground April 16, 2021 New York Times It is true that Arthur Miller lived at the Chelsea, and Mark Twain. Janis Joplin did in fact "service" Leonard Cohen there on an unmade bed. It's true that the acting legend Sarah Bernhardt, in her penthouse apartment at the Chelsea, slept nights in her custom-made coffin beneath her custom-made pyramid. On the tenth floor, Stanley Kubrick did argue with Arthur C. Clarke over the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The list of Chelsea luminaries goes on and on. Writers Thomas Wolfe, Nelson Algren, Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, Jean Baudrillard, and others just as famous, wrote books there. James Lough, This Ain't No Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980–1995 Schaffner Press 2013 1936182521 Introduction https://books.google.com/books?&id=cXvSnRVgdfwC&pg=PR3 i–iii (quote from p. iii) Built in 1883 as one of the first cooperative buildings in New York City and briefly among its tallest buildings, the Chelsea was under the ownership of David Bard, Joseph Gross, and Julius Krauss from 1942 and was managed by Bard. Combining both residences and hotel rooms,it was already a storied have for artists and writers by the time David Bard left the day-to-day management to his son Stanley in the early 1960s. Ray Mock, Introduction 17–22 Hotel Chelsea: Living in the Last Bohemian Haven The Monacelli Press 2019 1580935257 https://books.google.com/books?id=yBmtDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA17 (quote from p. 17; photographs by Colin Miller; foreword by Gaby Hoffmann & Alex Auder) Stanley Bard, a Robin Hood of innkeepers who nurtured talented writers and artists and tolerated assorted deadbeats as the manager and part-owner of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan for more than 40 years, died on Tuesday in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 82. ...While Mr. Bard presided over it, the Chelsea was also home to Viva (actress) Viva, the Andy Warhol film star; the artists Larry Rivers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Christo wrapped Jeanne-Claude, his wife, there); the singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen (who wrote a song about it, “Chelsea Hotel #2”); and the punk rock musician Dee Dee Ramone (who caricatured Mr. Bard in a horror novel he wrote).The Chelsea was where Jack Kerouac worked on “On the Road,” where Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey (novel) 2001: A Space Odyssey,” where William Burroughs wrote “Naked Lunch” and where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”Mr. Bard lent long-term tenants money and tolerated their overdue bills; he embraced their eccentricities and encouraged their cultural ambitions. Sam Roberts (journalist) Sam Roberts, Stanley Bard, Who Ran Chelsea Hotel as a Bohemian Sanctuary, Dies at 82 February 14, 2017 New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/nyregion/stanley-bard-dead-chelsea-hotel.html External links Inside NYC's famed Chelsea Hotel CBS Sunday Morning, YouTube November 27, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPRMvjKISqA Inside One of the Last Bohemian Homes at the Chelsea Hotel New York Magazine, YouTube November 5, 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF3nQWSnE2Q (Interior Lives with Wendy Goodman) Category:Buildings and structures in New York City Category:Hotels in the United States