The Chelsea Hotel is one of New York City's landmarks for good reason. It's served as housing for bohemian creatives and addicts, and been through several iterations over its history, from divey residential to high-end hotel. Learn all about this legendary place today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the Chelsea Hotel's historical significance?
It is a very cool city, and this is a cool place in the city's history for a long part of the city's history, actually. The Chelsea Hotel, which little known fact, is actually supposed to be called the Hotel Chelsea. And I could not find who first turned it around because surely it was a poet or a singer or something, a writer.
But at some point it got basically transversed, even though the official name is and always has been, since it was a hotel, the Hotel Chelsea Hotel.
Yeah, it can be a little confusing. Same place, though. So don't sweat it. So you can say either one.
Wait, wait, wait. You want to talk confusing? There's a Marriott Renaissance Chelsea Hotel in the same neighborhood. I mean, I could see myself accidentally booking that and being like, this place is a little more put together than I expected.
Yeah. I mean, Chelsea is a neighborhood and every hotel in there is a Hotel Chelsea.
Yeah.
Or a Chelsea Hotel, rather.
I love Chelsea. I think that is one of my favorite neighborhoods in New York, if not my favorite. We stayed there a bunch of times when we went and visited New York.
And Chelsea. Yeah, I like it as well. And I have stayed at the Hotel Chelsea a couple of times.
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Chapter 2: Who were the famous artists and residents of the Chelsea Hotel?
Well, you're asking me why they don't use them? Well, you're the one who brought it up. Look, Stanley, just get a vacuum cleaner up here and let's just forget this conversation, please. Fine, how are you otherwise? Truthfully, there is no otherwise. All I am is a man waiting desperately for a vacuum cleaner. And then Arthur Miller said, and then he would laugh, grateful for another happy tenant.
And that was like, And nothing was like ever wrong at the Chelsea. People were dying and being wheeled out of there and overdoses. And he would make jokes that like, no, the cops were here because they live there. And the body bags and the gurneys are just props.
Yeah, so apparently Milos Forman, a true bohemian, he lived at the Chelsea from, I think, for the early 70s, about the first half of the 70s. And he asked Stanley once if anyone had ever died. I believe to basically get him to admit.
Yeah, yeah.
Because there were a lot of deaths, whether it was by suicide, murder, mattress fires, overdoses. Yeah. And it was just well known that there were a lot of deaths that happened in the Chelsea Hotel. So Milos Forman asked Stanley once if he could think of anybody who ever died there. And he could only come up with one person. And he was a painter named Alpheus Cole.
That's funny.
He died in 1988, the oldest man in the world at 112. He died at the Chelsea Hotel. And that's the one person that Stanley could think of in the entire time that he was running the Chelsea Hotel.
Yeah. And Stanley ran it for 40 years after his dad died. But like I said, his dad had the same attitude. They asked David, the elder bard, why he didn't ever evict a tenant who apparently was playing the drums and everyone was complaining and it was even driving him nuts. And his answer was, I like people.
Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. Like you could get away with, from what I saw, you could get away with basically anything up to murder, essentially. And Stanley would put up with it because that was the rhythm that his father had kind of laid out.
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