Twenty third Street under the iron balconies, the lobby hung floor to ceiling with the art residents left instead of rent, the stair spiralling up twelve floors, the works in every frame.
The Hotel Chelsea at 222 West 23rd Street opened in 1884 as one of the city's first cooperative apartment buildings, designed by Philip Hubert, and became a hotel in 1905. Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith lived there, and Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls in its rooms. The city landmarked it in 1966, and it reopened as a hotel in 2022 after a long renovation.
Source · Hotel Chelsea ↗
The red brick front with black iron balconies stacked twelve storeys high, the neon vertical sign, the lobby with its fireplace and salon hang, the famous open stair with iron balusters climbing through the building, the corridors of numbered doors. Mood: room rate paid in paintings. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.