Below are pictures of Hotel Chelsea located at
222 West 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in Chelsea NYC.
It was the first stop on a walking tour of the neighborhood sponsored by Big Onion Walking Tours.
http://www.bigonion.com/
It was $15 well spent. The tour was one of the best researched tours I have taken. Julie,our guide for the day, also leads 12 other tours. As a result she easily places events and architecture in a larger perspective.
The hotel has always been a center of artistic and bohemian activity and it houses artwork created by many of the artists who have visited. The hotel was the first building to be listed by New York City as a cultural preservation site and historic building of note. The twelve-story red-brick building that now houses the Hotel Chelsea was built in 1883 as a private apartment cooperative that opened in 1884; it was the tallest building in New York until 1899. At the time Chelsea, and particularly the street on which the hotel was located, was the center of New York's Theater District.
The Chelsea’s history is unique. Bob Dylan composed songs here, Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning at the hotel, and it is where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols may have stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death.
Other visitors and residents (some stayed for years) include: Eugene O'Neil, Thomas Wolfe, Arthur C. Clarke (who wrote 2001: A Space Oddyssey while in residence). Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead passed through the hotels doors in the 1960s.
Virgil Thompson, Larry Rivers, William Burroughs, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Patti Smith, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Quentin Crisp, were also residents.
It still functions as a full service hotel and a location for movie and photo shoots.
Not far from The Chelsea is a building named The Corner, 729 6th Ave. at 24th St. This building was constructed in 1886 as an extension of the business empire of John Koster and Albert Bial. The Corner is the last vestige of Koster and Bial's 19th century entertainment empire that included vaudeville shows, musical entertainment, and refreshments. It is also a reminder of the era when Chelsea was one of the city's important theatrical hubs. http://www.14to42.net/24street5.html The Corner appears to have had a bar on the ground floor and "public rooms" on the upper stories. It was know to be black and tan house among other things and closed by the vice squad in 1896.
Gay Men’s Health Clinic
GMHC is the world’s first and leading provider of HIV/AIDS prevention, care and advocacy. Their Mission: GMHC fights to end the AIDS epidemic and uplift the lives of all affected.
History
In 1981, six men united against fear and death from a disease then known as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The group set up an answering machine in the home of Rodger McFarlane and the first AIDS hotline was born — receiving over 100 calls the first night. Today, GMHC continues to pioneer HIV prevention, care and advocacy.
Chelsea is the most densely populated gay zip code in the country.
GMHC lease has recently become unaffordable.
Just up the street is Jeanne D’Arc Home, a residence hotel on Eighth Avenue and 24th Street run by an order of nuns. It presently houses 135 women. It’s probably the only residency in the city, single-sex or otherwise, that has its own chapel, and one of the few that prohibits men past the front desk.
The home has an interesting history.
It was to be a place where “friendless French girls who come to this country” could establish themselves and find work as ”femmes de chambre, bonnes d’enfant, and gouvernantes,” as an 1896 New York Times article explains.
The women living there now represent all nationalities and pay $500. a month for a studio. But the rules are Nuns rules: no noise, lights out at a certain time, no smoking, no alcohol, and I would think a curfew.
Just around the corner is Penn South a 15 building high rise co-op. It is a city with in a city with its own uniformed security force, a staff of 110 employees, its own power plant, a community garden, an exercise room, an extremely active seniors' program, a group of stores and restaurants on the premises, and even a theater. And a long waiting list.
The above frame houses were built by James N. Wells in 1846. Wells helped Clement Clarke Moore develop Chelsea, which was Moore's estate. He along with Moore developed building codes for the new buildings and set up a grid system. One of the codes was no frame buildings…..
Moore's Chelsea Estate was the largest on the west side of Manhattan Island above Houston Street and was mostly open countryside. Moore began to develop Chelsea, dividing it up into lots along Ninth Avenue and selling them to well-heeled New Yorkers. He also donated to the Episcopal diocese an apple orchard consisting of 66 tracts for use as a seminary, construction on which began in 1827. This became the General Theological Seminary located on West 20th Street.
General Theological Seminary
Across 20th Street from the Seminary, the row houses and tenements between the corner buildings on the avenues are set back ten feet. This follows an 1834 agreement between Moore and another prominent landowner and developer, Don Alonso Cushman,
The Donac apartment building (left) at #402 negotiates the transition to garden setback by way of a gracefully curved facade. It was commissioned by a daughter of Don Alonso Cushman on land she inherited from him, and built in 1898 to a design by the mansion and apartment house specialist C.P.H. Gilbert.
The building to the right of the Donac, #404, has a plaque reading, “Oldest Dwelling in Chelsea, Frame House with Brick Front, 1830.”
To the right of #404 are the houses of Cushman Row
Our tour ended on The High Line
