Hotel Chelsea (New York City, New York) | landmark, Victorian Gothic (architecture), interesting place, apartment building, 1883_construction

 hotel, landmark, Victorian Gothic (architecture), interesting place, apartment building, 1883_construction

181-foot, 12-story Victorian-Gothic hotel completed in 1885 for Philip Hubert as a an apartment flat cooperative. Designed by Hubert & Pirsson, the 125 year old hotel was home to a motley crew of painters, musicians, writers and other self-described bohemians and, like many of its inhabitants, the Chelsea looks as if it has had a long, eventful life. At the time of its construction, the building was the tallest in New York.

"This hotel does not belong to America," wrote playwright and onetime resident Arthur Miller. "There are no vacuum cleaners, no rules and shame." In these rooms, Leonard Cohen met Janis Joplin on an unmade bed. Bob Dylan stayed up for days, longing for his estranged wife. Both men memorialized the hotel in song. In one room, Thomas Wolfe wrote "You Can’t Go Home Again," and in another Arthur C. Clarke penned "2001: A Space Odyssey." The poet Dylan Thomas spent his last days at the hotel before a drinking binge finished him off in 1953, and 25 years later the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious allegedly stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in their room at the hotel.

For four decades, Stanley Bard, 74, worked as the hotel’s manager and cheerleader. The hotel, he thought, was a community of like-minded souls more than a business. His father and two partners had bought the hotel in 1939, and Bard began working there in the 1950s. Eventually, Bard wanted his own son, David, to take over the management, but last year, a dispute left the heirs of the other partners, Marlene Krauss and David Elder, in control.

Since then the new owners have fought bitterly with the permanent residents over the future of the famed hotel on West 23rd Street – a battle that residents say is a fight for the hotel’s soul. In June 2007 Krauss and Elder hired B.D. Hotels of New York to manage and renovate the hotel. After forcing Stanley Bard out, the company began putting pressure on long-term tenants, getting rid of at least 15 people in less than a year, according to court papers and people at the hotel.

The tenants feared that Krauss and Elder wanted to transform the Chelsea into a boutique hotel and, although they never saw any plans, they worried that character would be sacrificed in favor of a spa and rooftop bar. They fought back, suing the owners over rent stabilization and demanding the return of the Bards. Elder and Krauss eventually grew disenchanted with BD Hotels, and the company was fired. The tenants took this as a something of a victory in a long-running conflict. The Hotel was closed in October 2011, and a major renovation began afterward

Hamilton describes how Hiroya, a Japanese painter, left several works of art at the hotel when he died a few years ago. One of Hiroya’s paintings hangs in the stairwell between the seventh and eighth floors. A line of Japanese text scrawled on the canvas roughly translates as, "From here, it’s heaven." In the hallway bathroom outside Hamilton's room, a photocopied photograph of an older man with caked white makeup hangs in a golden frame above the toilet. The man in the picture was Herbert Huncke, a hustler, drug addict and Beat Generation muse who spent his last year at the hotel, dying there in 1996. For years afterward, Hamilton had to shoo away Huncke’s junkie buddies who came to shoot up in the bathroom. Over time, they disappeared. Now the greatest nuisance for Hamilton is replacing the picture of Huncke every time a tourist steals it.

The most notable feature of the building is the succession, tier on tier, of horizontal iron balconies. These balconies, richly decorated with leaves and flowers, lend an atmosphere of charm to this high brick facade, as do the French doors opening onto them. A central, tower-like section of the front has a high, pyramidal slate roof, flanked on each side by enormous brick chimneys. Complementing this central feature are projecting wings at each end of the building, adorned at their tops by large pointed-arch windows set in brick gables As a masonry bearing-wall structure, this building has some of the first fireproofed wrought-iron beams. They span the distance between walls, without intermediate columns.

The hotel reopened under new ownership of Ira Drukier, Richard Born and Sean MacPherson/BD Hotels.

hotelchelsea.com/
daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-chelsea-hote...
s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/0215.pdf
www.hotelchelseablog.com