Where artists went to drink and die

Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea Hotel in the dead of night and informed his mistress that he had just drunk 18 straight whiskies, which he suspected was a record. He then dropped to his knees, lowered his head onto her lap and mumbled his last words: ‘I love you, but I’m alone.’

On another occasion, during a fund-raising lunch, Jackson Pollock drunkenly vomited on the Chelsea’s carpet, inadvertently improvising, you might say, one of his own drip paintings.

On yet another, plastered, the novelists Jack Kerouac and Gore Vidal decided that they ‘owed it to literary history’ (the phrase was Vidal’s) to go to bed together. They checked into the Chelsea, declared to the night porter that they had rendered the register valuable by signing it, and then staggered upstairs to perform the laborious deed. Kerouac winced the next morning at the memory of his Goring. ‘In the light of day,’ Sherill Tippins remarks dryly, ‘his encounter with Vidal seemed less historically significant than he’d imagined.’ Sex. Vomit. Death. That pretty much sums up the carousel of themes in this impressive, if occasionally depressing, history of the Hotel Chelsea (to give it its official name).

Built as a vast apartment block in the Chelsea district of Manhattan in 1883, and converted into a hotel two decades later, it was designed to be a utopian haven. Its architect, Philip Hubert, was inspired by the writings of Charles Fourier, who envisioned communities that would give special precedence to artists. Fourier, of course, was as mad as a bagful of spanners. He also recommended that members of his micro-societies engage in frequent ‘celebratory orgies’ to strengthen communal bonds — which is an excuse worth bearing in mind the next time your wife finds you in bed with the neighbours.