The Chelsea Renaissance: A Literary Legacy

Published: Thursday, July 15, 2010 4:10 PM CDT

BY STEPHEN WOLF 

The transformation of Chelsea over the past two centuries tells the story, in miniature, of Manhattan itself. It’s a story of glory days and dark times, of heights and struggles—as a neighborhood passes in and out of fashion, only to emerge as one of the hippest areas in town.
As with some other parts of the city’s most fertile areas, Chelsea has adapted to those changes—and though the most famous YMCA in disco music is now the David Barton Gym, Chelsea once again is a most varied and vibrant neighborhood.
When the art galleries in SoHo became so expensive and needed to pay the enormous bills, the avant-garde—never and by intention at the commercial forefront of the art world—had to find cheaper and more receptive galleries. Greenwich Village and the East Village had few suitable spaces — and besides, the Village had long been too expensive for struggling artists. But above West 14th Street had plenty of warehouse space at the western edges of the quiet, peaceful, tree-lined streets. And so, amid the beauty of what had once been one of Manhattan’s most fashionable areas, a neighborhood was revitalized.
Amid the stately elegance of the Theological Seminary and long, lovely rows of townhouses (along broad, busy avenues offering sublime, surprising appearances of the Empire State Building), gallery after gallery moved to Chelsea.
Cafes and restaurants soon followed. Eventually, even the prestigious and renowned Marlborough Gallery (from West 57th) opened on West 19th St. and declared overtly what many already knew: The new hot spot in the art world was the quiet, stately neighborhood of Chelsea. And though a great artistic fervor once teemed on Greenwich Village and Harlem streets in the 1920s (and the Village again in the 1950s and the East Village after that), Chelsea—like the steady, quiet tortoise in the race—has had a long though less popularized literary past all its own and is currently experiencing a renaissance like few New York neighborhoods ever had.
Chelsea is called Chelsea because of an Englishman. In 1750, when England was most dominant in this its prized harbor of colonial New York, Captain Thomas Clarke acquired an estate stretching from what is now Eighth to Tenth Avenue, and from 14th to 29th Street. He named it Chelsea in memory of a cherished district of London. His family easily adjusted to life no longer under the king but rather these newly United States.
Clarke’s grandson quickly understood the city’s grid plan of the early 19th century — where streets would be orderly and numbered chronologically. Seeing the city’s inevitable, unrelenting march uptown, he divided his estate into lots, creating handsome, stylish rows of houses (among them Cushman Row on West 20th Street). But Clement Clarke Moore is known less for his stylization of Chelsea than for his enduring poem that begins “ ‘twas the night before Christmas....” And so began Chelsea’s rich literary history.
In 1862, the great novelist Edith Wharton was born at 14 West 23rd Street, and she set her novel The Age of Innocence on West 28th Street. Stephen Crane moved to 165 West 23rd shortly after the success of The Red Badge of Courage, and Cuban leader and poet José Martí lived briefly at 51 West 29th Street (there’s a large, overbearing equestrian statue of him at a Central Park entrance). O. Henry—author of that achingly sweet and pathetic New York Christmas story “The Gift of the Magi”—had a room at the Marty Hotel (47 West 24th) before moving to the more renowned Hotel Chelsea.
Chelsea also has had its haunts for writers and artists. In the early 20th Century there was the Café Frances at West 23rd Street—where the proprietor occasionally gave free rooms to struggling writers. Petitpas (a hotel on West 29th with a backyard garden restaurant) was owned by three French sisters with a passion for painters. John Sloan, the great New York painter from the Ashcan School, did a beautiful oil of this restaurant set during an evening when frequented by William Butler Yeats (Yeats at Petitpas, 1910).
By then the most fashionable Chelsea had become decidedly Irish, and neighborhood boy Richard “Slippery Dick” Connally threw himself into the Tweed Ring. Most men in Chelsea worked as longshoremen along the river, and though now a sports complex, Chelsea Piers were once actual piers. The Titanic would have docked at pier 60 that April of 1912, but instead the Carpathia brought survivors to pier 54.
Two years later, the Ninth Mounted Cavalry division moved to 14th Street and film producer Adolph Zukor took over the Armory, once the Chelsea Television Studio at 221 West 26th but now seemingly ruled by Martha Stewart. Down the block and connected to Zukor’s growing empire was The Famous Players, an actors’ studio and workshop. Movies like Butterfield 8 and Twelve Angry Men were made there, as well as New York films like The French Connection. During the 1950s, Phil Silvers’ television show Sargeant Bilko was produced in the Chelsea studio as well as Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners and, until recently, the long-running soap opera The Guiding Light.
The Edwin Booth Theater opened near Sixth Avenue in 1869, and though for a while the center of the theater district before it moved further uptown, Chelsea is again lively with new and innovative performances. The Joyce Theater has become a force in the world of dance. Known in the 1940s as the Elgin Theater, it showed movies and, when much of Manhattan hit dark times, porn. It closed entirely then but re-opened as the Joyce Theater in 1982. In Chelsea, too, is The Kitchen on West 19th Street, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater on West 26th, and the Atlantic Theater Company on West 20th.
Sherwood Anderson lived at 427 West 22nd Street prior to the appearance of his influential 1919 story collection Winesburg, Ohio. Before writing innovative, imagistic poetry, Wallace Stevens studied law while living at 441 West 21st from 1909 until 1916 —and Malcolm Cowley, who wrote Exiles Return (the brilliant study of writers in New York after World War I), lived at 360 West 22nd and edited The New Republic from offices at 419-423 West 21st Street.
When Amiri Baraka was still LeRoi Jones, he roomed at 402 West 20th. There’s a popular photograph of Allen Ginsberg on bongo drums in the living room. James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of a Colored Man (published in 1912) tells of his arrival in New York, and though The Club (a meeting place for black writers) was actually on West 53rd Street, Johnson moved it to West 27th Street off Sixth Avenue.
Perhaps the most revered artifact in American literature was created in three weeks on the second floor of 454 West 20th Street in April 1951—the 120-foot roll of teletype paper given by Lucian Carr to her friend Jack Kerouac. Though generally associated with the literary life of Greenwich Village and the East Village, it was in Chelsea that he wrote on that roll the first draft On the Road.
But the real heart of the artistic life in this area was the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd—a beautiful structure still replete with its 19th Century gables and wrought iron balconies. When it opened in 1883 (as the city’s first apartment cooperative), it was then the tallest building in town. The Chelsea failed as a co-op—but in 1905, it became a hotel and is now inarguably the most famous hotel in all of American literature, art, and film. It still has two genuine, workable telephone booths in the back.
Mark Twain stayed here in 1888. John Sloan had a studio in the Chelsea, and Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology) lived in the hotel in the thirties. In his poem “The Chelsea Hotel,” he wrote of “Poets and celebrated actresses” who “lived here and made its soul.”
Thomas Wolfe had a room with a toilet on a raised platform that he referred to as “The Throne Room.” Best known for his passionate coming-of-age autobiographical novel Look Homeward Angel published in 1929, his short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” is a classic in New York fiction.
Though known as the epic Chicago novelist, James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy) lived in the Chelsea in the early 1950s, as did the brilliant, provocative Mary McCarthy (whose 1963 novel The Group was startling, arousing, and a herald of the future). The Irish playwright Brendan Behan moved to the Chelsea in 1961, and one of America’s great three dramatists, Arthur Miller, lived in the Chelsea in the early 1960s—calling it “the only hotel I know which has no class lines.” The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas stayed at the Chelsea whenever in New York, and it was from the Chelsea that he was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village the night he died in 1953.
James Schuyler—the most lyrical of the notorious, self-effacing, brilliant New York School of Poets—lived in room 625 at the Chelsea for the last 20 years of his life. He is among those honored by a plaque on the building’s front, and the hotel and his room appears in his poem “Morning”—which “breaks in splendor on/the window glass of/ the French doors to/ the shallow balcony/ of my room with a/ cast iron balustrade/ in a design of flowers….”
My favorite poem about the Chelsea was written by the great Derek Walcott, who writes of “the hotel’s bronze plaque of greats/ who hit the bottle or the street, grew rich/ or famous. Their fame curls like layers of beige/ paint.…” And embracing even the hotel’s down-beat, shabby nature, the Nobel Prize winner ends “The Chelsea” with a tribute to all those who lived here: “Across the window furnished room and loft/ lamp-lit their intimacies. Happier lives,/ settled in ruts,/ and great for wanting less.”
On his album Desire, Bob Dylan “stayed up for days in the Chelsea Hotel writing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Leonard Cohen wrote “The Chelsea Hotel” (“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/ you were famous, your heart was a legend”), and the hotel was the setting for Andy Warhol’s film The Chelsea Girls. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin loved the Chelsea, and, in October of 1978, Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. More recently and less dramatically, Bon Jovi wrote “Midnight at Chelsea.”
Tennessee Williams (another of the great three American playwrights), Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sam Shepard, Virgil Thomson, Arthur C. Clarke, and I have all stayed in the Chelsea— finding it, as Dorothy Parker said, a place to “lay my hat and a few friends.” Its lobby is an art museum all its own, with works by famous residents Red Grooms, Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, and dangling from the ceiling, Renata Goebel’s Woman on a Swing.
Lacking the tourists who crowd Greenwich Village or the clamor that permeates the East Village, Chelsea is one of the most graceful, vibrant, varied, and loveliest parts of town. How comforting and pleasurable to stroll Chelsea’s streets, all the while mingling with the spirits of those writers and artists who provided its glorious past.

See James Schuyler’s “Morning” in I Speak of the City: Poems of New York