Among other Chelsea Hotel inhabitants are the writer Jakov Lind and the composer Virgil Thomson, who has made the hotel his home for 40 years. Brazilian photographer, Claudio Edinger first visited the Chelsea Hotel in 1976. A few weeks later, he moved in to stay and took pictures of the residents. Eighty portraits along with an introduction by Pete Hamill were gathered into the book, Chelsea Hotel, published by Abbeville Press. And as Pete Hamill noted, "Still they come, full of hope or despair, to make the Chelsea their home."
The idea of the Chelsea Hotel originated with Philip Hubert, a French-born architect with the firm, Hubert & Pirsson. Hubert is credited with originating the co-op in New York as well as the duplex apartment concept. The original Chelsea Hotel had a barbershop, restaurant, top-floor artists' studios, a roof garden, maid service, and about 100 apartments with 70 owned by stockholders and about 30 rented. In 1885, many apartments were owned by tradesmen and suppliers on the project who were persuaded to take them in lieu of money. The apartments cost from $7,000 to $12,000 each. A floor plan in the hotel collection of the library of the New-York Historical Society is close to the original design. It shows a long, east-west hallway running from end to end serving about 10 apartments per floor, most with two bedrooms.
During that time period, 23rd Street was the prototype thoroughfare of American Broadway Theater. Like Bowery and 14th Street before it, this era would soon pass. But in the late 19th century, Chelsea was the center for theater entertainment with the Opera House Palace, Pike's Opera House, and Proctor's Vaudeville Theater daily shows.
Changes occurred in Chelsea with the opening of The Empire, Broadway's first uptown theater near 40th Street. The migration and establishment of theater took several years, but the social landscape of Chelsea was soon altered. Stripped of the glamourous theater audiences, 23rd Street became a location for industrial commerce. Financial panics of 1893 and 1903 combined with the rising costs of urban life, bankrupted the Chelsea cooperative and forced the relocation of its original inhabitants. By 1905, the Chelsea cooperative was sold and reorganized as a hotel.
The Chelsea Hotel began a different era of occupants ranging from writers to artists and urban transients, including Dee Dee Ramone who lived at the hotel on and off since 1974. He wrote the songs for Ramones and accomplished the best work at the hotel because it was quiet and the walls were thick. His book called, "How I Survived the Ramones," tells the story of the band. Today, recent residents include Sally Singer, the fashion news editor at Vogue magazine, and her husband, Joseph O'Neill, an Irish novelist and lawyer, who are raising their three sons in an eighth-floor suite.
The current Chelsea has 250 units of one to four rooms. Three-quarters of the rooms are occupied by long-term residents. The others are transient rooms. Many suites retain their Victorian layouts and spectacular carved working marble fireplaces. The suites are furnished in an artistic exhibition of styles. Some have the decor of the 1950s with tube steel dinette sets, others show large carved Victorian dressers with light fixtures like modern art. The wide hallways with windows at each end remind one of Renaissance Italy with its small back streets. The two-part manager's office was carved out of the original Ladies' Reception room on the ground floor. Ceiling murals shadow old bookcases full of Chelsea history. There is a high, open staircase behind the check-in desk. Rising ten floors to a spacious skylight, it is paired with a complicated Victorian iron railing. Like the rest of the hotel, it is decorated with the artwork of present and past tenants. It is a lively old haunt that continues to echo eternal artistic excellence. There are plaques mounted in front of the Chelsea Hotel dedicated to deceased artists who once lived here: Thomas Wolfe, Brendan Behan, Virgil Thomson.
These days, for about 250 dollars per night, one can get a room in the historic Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street. All rooms include cable television, shower, bathroom, and bellman service with local restaurants willing to deliver food directly to your hotel room.
The migration of a multitude of art galleries in the Chelsea neighborhood have added to the Chelsea Hotel's history, charm, and vibrancy. The romance with art in Chelsea continues. People who come here live and love life creatively.