Hotel Chelsea was begun in 1883 and opened in 1884 as a co-operative apartment house: eleven storeys of red brick on West 23rd Street, rising to twelve at the back, designed by Philip Hubert, with flower-ornamented iron balconies under a high mansard roof. It became an apartment hotel in 1905, and under Stanley Bard, who ran it for 43 years until 2007, writers, painters and musicians lived here cheaply, some of them paying in paintings. Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith were all residents. It closed to new guests in 2011, came through three sets of developers and years of lawsuits, and reopened in 2022 under the third, Sean MacPherson, Ira Drukier and Richard Born.
There are 155 rooms and suites, restored without being smoothed out: marble bathrooms with antiqued brass, headboards painted like splattered canvases and curtains pierced with small holes that let in a dappled light. The Petite Chelsea is about 200 sq ft (19 m²), with a queen bed on a lower floor. The Premier Chelsea, at 500 to 600 sq ft (46 to 56 m²), is the first category sold with a deep soaking tub. The tenth-floor Lofts were the original artists' studios.
You book it for the life of the building. The lobby is hung with work by residents past and present, much of it once traded for rent, and check-in sits under a frescoed ceiling of cherubs and roses in the old ladies' tea room. The iron-railed staircase winds from the lobby to the roof between walls lined with more art. El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant that first opened in 1930, still has its Don Quixote murals, its red neon script over the door and the bar where Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were regulars. The Lobby Bar fills the hotel's original dining rooms, with a baby grand piano and a glass-enclosed solarium, and Teruko serves sushi in the basement in front of a backbar salvaged from the Orchid Bar at Tokyo's Hotel Okura. On the roof, a spa with a cedarwood sauna, steam rooms and a terrace garden is free to adult guests when there is space.
The trade is the street and the size of the cheapest rooms. West 23rd Street is a busy crosstown road, guests on the front keep mentioning the noise, and the lifts draw complaints too. The Petite Chelsea is small and low down, there is no pool, and the Lobby Bar pours until two. Book it if the New York you came for is the one in the songs and the books, and you want to sleep in the building where so much of it was written.
