Chelsea gay nyc

History

Constructed in 1883 when Fresh York’s theater district was centered around 23rd Street, the Victorian Gothic style building was initially one of the city’s first cooperative apartment buildings, but it reopened as a luxury hotel in 1905. With Mark Twain, O. Henry, Oscar Wilde, and Sarah Bernhardt among its earliest guests, the Chelsea quickly acquired a bohemian reputation, which heralded its status in the mid-20th century as New York’s hub for the Beat generation. “There was none of the anonymous impersonal hotel ambiance…I kept rendezvous people I knew from Europe in the halls,” Beat penner William S. Burroughs recalled. Further contributing to its lore, writers Gore Vidal and Jack Kerouac famously checked into the Chelsea for sex in 1953 after a night out at the San Remo Café and Tony Pastor’s Downtown in Greenwich Village. From the 1970s until his ousting in 2007, manager and part-owner Stanley Bard further cultivated the hotel’s reputation by offering cheap rent to a variety of eccentrics and occasionally accepting art in lieu of rent.

Throughout its life as a literary, musical, and artistic enclave, the Chelsea has been home to many LGB