Hotel
Related: building - tourism - city
Famous hotels: Chelsea Hotel (New York) - Beat Hotel (Paris)
Definition
A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging, usually on a short-term basis and especially for tourists. Hotels often provide a number of additional guest services such as a restaurant, a swimming pool or childcare. Some hotels have conference services and encourage groups to hold conventions and meetings at their location.
Hotels differ from motels in that most motels have drive-up, exterior entrances to the rooms, while hotels tend to have interior entrances to the rooms, making them safer and more relaxing to people. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel [Jan 2006]
Hotel Chelsea, NYC
The Hotel Chelsea is a well-known residence for artists, musicians, and writers in the neighborhood of Chelsea in New York City. The building is located on 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
The hotel welcomes guests, but is primarily known for its long-term residents, past and present. The hotel has always been a centre of artistic and bohemian activity and it houses artwork created by many of the artists who have visited. The hotel was the first building to be listed by New York City as a cultural preservation site and historic building of note.
The building that now houses the Hotel Chelsea was built in 1883 as a private apartment cooperative that opened in 1884. It was the tallest building in New York until 1902. At the time Chelsea, and particularly the street on which the hotel was located, was the center of New York's Theater District. However, within a few years the combination of economic worries and the relocation of the theaters bankrupted the Chelsea cooperative. In 1905, the building was purchased and opened as a hotel.
It is perhaps most well known as the hotel where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols allegedly stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death on October 12, 1978.
People who live/have lived at the Hotel Chelsea
Writers and thinkers
During its lifetime Hotel Chelsea has provided a home to many great writers and thinkers including Mark Twain, O. Henry, Dylan Thomas, Arthur C. Clarke, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller, Quentin Crisp, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Brendan Behan, Robert Oppenheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.Actors and film directors
The hotel has been a home to actors and film directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Milos Forman, Lillie Langtry, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper, Uma Thurman and Jane Fonda.Musicians
Much of Hotel Chelsea's history has been colored by the musicians who have resided there. Some of the most prominent names include Patti Smith, Virgil Thomson, Dee Dee Ramone of The Ramones, Henri Chopin, John Cale, Édith Piaf, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Ryan Adams, Jobriath, Rufus Wainwright and Anthony Kiedis. In April 2003 Pete Doherty and Carl Barat of The Libertines recorded the original "Babyshambles" sessions at Hotel Chelsea.Visual artists
The hotel has featured and collected the work of the many visual artists who have passed through. Brett Whiteley, Christo, Richard Bernstein, Robert Mapplethorpe, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Robert Crumb, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Vali Myers (artist) and Henri Cartier-Bresson have all spent time at Hotel Chelsea.Warhol superstars
Hotel Chelsea is often associated with the Warhol superstars, as he directed The Chelsea Girls, a film about his Factory regulars and their lives at the hotel. Chelsea residents from the Warhol scene included Viva, Ultra Violet, Holly Woodlawn, Edie Sedgwick, Andrea Feldman, Nico, Paul America, and Brigid Berlin. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel ChelseaBeat Hotel, Paris
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It gained fame through the extended 'family' of beat writers and artists who stayed there from the late 1950s to the early 1960s in a ferment of creativity.
Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky first stayed there in 1957 and were soon joined by William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. It was here that Burroughs completed the text of Naked Lunch and began his lifelong collaboration with Brion Gysin. It was also where Ian Sommerville became Burroughs' 'systems advisor' and lover. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the Cut-up technique and with Sommerville they experimented with a 'dream machine' and audio tape cut-ups. Ginsberg wrote his moving and mature poem Kaddish at the hotel and Corso wrote the Mushroom cloud shaped poem Bomb. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Hotel [Jan 2006]