Notas del episodio
Manhattan's Hotel Chelsea was built in 1883 and 1884 at 222 West 23rd Street by architect Philip Hubert, a Queen Anne and Victorian Gothic pile that stood among the tallest buildings in the city. It began not as a hotel but as a Hubert Home Club, a utopian housing cooperative with about 100 apartments deliberately mixing large luxury units and small modest rooms on the same floors so different classes would share corridors. Three foot thick masonry walls, wrought iron floor beams, 12 to 14 foot ceilings, and the city's first duplex and penthouse apartments made it a fortress. By 1905 the co-op was failing and became an apartment hotel of 125 units, with small studios renting for $1.50 a night.
In 1912 survivors of the Titanic came to the Chelsea after the Carpathia docked at nearby Pier 54, and in 1942 the lower floors housed a maritime training station. As the theater district moved north, writers like Thomas Wolfe and Edgar Lee Masters moved in. Under Stanley Bard, who ran the hotel for 43 years, it became home to Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, and Leonard Cohen, despite pests and unreliable heat. Bard was ousted in 2007, the hotel closed in 2011, and it reopened in 2022 under BD Hotels as a luxury property with a rooftop spa.
- Arthur C. Clarke finishing 2001: A Space Odyssey in a building he called his spiritual home
- Bob Dylan living next door to Sara Lownds, his future wife, and Edie Sedgwick setting her room on fire
- Rent control that kept some long-term tenants paying as little as $155 a month late into the 20th century
- Residents who paid Stanley Bard in paintings that covered the lobby walls until the renovation stripped them away
- A culture where networking with famous neighbors was frowned on, in sharp contrast to the Plaza and the Algonquin