Hotel Chelsea and the Night Nancy Spungen Died

On your left stands the Hotel Chelsea, a red brick building with ornate iron balconies that has sheltered more writers, musicians, and self destructed careers than almost any address in New York.

The hotel opened in eighteen eighty four as one of the city's first cooperative apartment buildings, built by the architect Philip Hubert with some of the earliest duplex and penthouse apartments in Manhattan. Financial trouble set in within a couple of decades, and by nineteen oh five it had reinvented itself as a hotel, and over the following century it became a magnet for artists who could not, or would not, live anywhere conventional. Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, and Patti Smith all lived here at one point, and for years the manager Stanley Bard reportedly accepted paintings in place of rent.

The hotel's darkest chapter came on the morning of October twelfth, nineteen seventy eight, when staff found twenty year old Nancy Spungen dead in a bathroom here, stabbed with a hunting knife her boyfriend had bought her days earlier. That boyfriend was Sid Vicious, bassist for the Sex Pistols, and he was arrested and charged with second degree murder. Vicious gave conflicting accounts of what happened that night, at one point suggesting Spungen had fallen onto the blade herself, and with several other people having passed through the room earlier, his defense team explored whether someone else was responsible. The question was never settled in court. Released on bail, Vicious died of a heroin overdose on February second, nineteen seventy nine, before his trial could begin.

That unresolved tragedy only deepened the hotel's reputation as a place where brilliant, troubled people came to live out their lives in public, for better and for worse, which is still the reputation the Chelsea carries today.