The Hotel Chelsea

Along with Leonard Cohen, first we’ll take Manhattan. Set up headquarters at The Hotel Chelsea, otherwise known as The Chelsea Hotel.

For anyone who really loves the arts and wants easy access to a large culturally-packed chunk of the city at a reasonable price, it’s worth checking out their website. This is not a luxury hotel, but it is a working one, with long-term residents and reasonable amenities (like a refrigerator and coffee maker). I love it for its low-key ambience, excellent location and intense history, among other things.

Here’s a sampling of people who’ve stayed (and created) in The Chelsea time-space intersection:

Sarah Bernhardt; Mark Twain; Edgar Lee Masters; Hart Crane; Henri Chopin; Thomas Wolfe; Édith Piaf; Frida Kahlo; Diego Rivera; Dylan Thomas (until the end); Nelson Algren; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Julius Robert Oppenheimer; Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend); Jean-Paul Sartre; Simone de Beauvoir; Willem de Kooning; Jasper Johns; Vladimir Nabokov; Arthur C. Clark (drafting 2001: A Space Odyssey); Stanley Kubrick; Shirley Clarke; Arthur Miller (After the Fall); Rebecca Miller; Tennessee Williams; Gore Vidal; Brenda Behan; Brion Gysin; William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch); Jack Kerouac (On the Road); Bob Dylan (Blonde on Blonde); Bob Neuwirth; Edie Sedgwick; Mary Woronov; Brigid Berlin; Nico; Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix; Grace Slick and The Jefferson Airplane; Leonard Cohen; Joni Mitchell (“Chelsea Morning”); Kris Kristofferson; Jane Fonda; Donald Sutherland; Dennis Hopper; John Cale; Sam Shepard; Patti Smith; Robert Mapplethorpe; Iggy and the Stooges (“We Will Fall” – Room 121); Sid Vicious; Nancy Spungen; Dee Dee Ramone; Grace Jones; Miloš Forman; Uma Thurman; Ethan Hawke (Chelsea Walls); Gaby Hoffman.

Though no comprehensive history of the place and its guests has yet been published, there's Chelsea Horror Hotel (2001) by Dee Dee Ramone and the upcoming Chelsea Hotel Manhattan by Joe Ambrose, to be made available on February 1, 2007 (cover pictured above).

Don’t confuse this Hotel Chelsea with the London version or with Elvis Costello’s bitingly great song, “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea.”

I most certainly do want to go back to The Chelsea.

Hotel Chelsea
222 W 23rd St
New York NY 10011
Telephone: (212) 243-3700
Fax: (212) 675-5531

Today's Rune: Growth.

Bon voyage!