Picture the most storied residential hotel in American literary and artistic history, the one now facing you. The Chelsea was built in 1884 as one of New York's first cooperative apartment buildings, then converted to a hotel, and for more than a century it was the address of the celebrated, the struggling, and the doomed. Mark Twain and O. Henry stayed here.
Thomas Wolfe wrote an entire novel in this building using notebooks he piled on top of a refrigerator. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death here in 1953. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey in a room upstairs.
Bob Dylan lived here in 1964. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen all passed through. Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death here in 1978.
The plaques on the facade outside name only a fraction of those who lived and worked and suffered inside. Look at the ornate iron balconies and the brick Victorian facade; behind every window a story, and behind most of them, several.