The Hotel Chelsea

The story

The Hotel Chelsea at 222 West 23rd Street was built between 1883 and 1884 and began taking residents in 1884. Philip Hubert designed it, working with the firm Hubert, Pirsson & Co., in a Queen Anne Revival or Victorian Gothic style. It began as a housing cooperative and was converted to a hotel in 1905.

Over the decades its residents included Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Arthur C. Clarke, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. The hotel also drew darker attention: Nancy Spungen died there in 1978, and her boyfriend Sid Vicious, charged with her murder, died the following year.

The city Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building a landmark in March 1966, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. After a residents' campaign, the owner agreed in 2014 to preserve a first-floor suite the poet Dylan Thomas had occupied.

What's There Now

Most of the building is a luxury hotel of about 155 rooms and suites that reopened in 2022, operated by BD Hotels since 2016, with the El Quijote restaurant and Cafe Chelsea.

Everything that was here

• 1905–present · still open

  The Hotel ChelseaHotel

  Built in 1884 as a cooperative apartment house, it later sheltered Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith.

  See the map in 1906 →

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Nearby history