Wander east
along 23rd Street, past Eighth Avenue to find one of the neighborhood's major
claims to fame - the
Chelsea Hotel
at no. 222. The undisputed watering hole of the city's (often hard-up) literati,
it has lodged Mark Twain and Tennessee Williams, while Brendan Behan and Dylan
Thomas staggered in and out during their New York visits. Thomas Wolfe assembled
You Can't Go Home Again from thousands of pages of manuscript he had
stacked in his room; in 1951, Jack Kerouac, armed with a specially adapted
typewriter (and a lot of Benzedrine), typed the first draft of On the Road
nonstop onto a 120-foot roll of paper. William Burroughs completed Naked
Lunch and Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while in
residence.
In
the 1960s, the
Chelsea
entered a wilder phase. Andy Warhol and his doomed protégés Edie
Sedgwick and Candy Darling walled up here and made the film Chelsea
Girls as a twisted homage. Nico, Hendrix, Zappa, Pink Floyd, Patti
Smith and various members of the Grateful Dead passed through, and in
1978, Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in their suite.
With a pedigree like this it's easy to forget the hotel itself, which
has a down-at-heel Edwardian grandeur all of its own, and, incidentally
is also an affordable place to stay.
Explore Chelsea
Chelsea /
Chelsea
Hotel /
Chelsea Piers /
Eight, Ninth and Tenth
Avenues
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