Hotel Chelsea

"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, , Richard Born and Sean MacPherson, known for their trendy s like the Ludlow, the and the , resumed work. They plan to open the Chelsea to guests by the end of the year."

"It is true that lived at the Chelsea, and . did in fact "service" there on an unmade bed. Its true that the acting legend , in her penthouse apartment at the Chelsea, slept nights in her custom-made coffin beneath her custom-made pyramid. On the tenth floor, did argue with over the screenplay for . The list of Chelsea luminaries goes on and on. Writers , , , , , and others just as famous, wrote books there."

"Stanley Bard, a 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 , the film star; the artists , (Christo wrapped Jeanne-Claude, his wife, there); the singer-songwriters and (who wrote a song about it, “Chelsea Hotel #2”); and the punk rock musician (who caricatured Mr. Bard in a horror novel he wrote). The Chelsea was where worked on “,” where wrote “,” where wrote “” and where wrote “.” Mr. Bard lent long-term tenants money and tolerated their overdue bills; he embraced their eccentricities and encouraged their cultural ambitions."

"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."

"... At the hotel on Twenty-third Street, famously rundown and louche—the Last Bohemia for the Final Beatniks, our own Chateau Marmont, where drank and wrote “” and wore (or didn’t; people argue) his famous blue raincoat, and killed (or didn’t; they argue that, too) —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 “,” by and , 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."