The hotel has an ornate history, both as a birth place of creative modern art and home of bad behavior. Bob Dylan composed songs while staying at the Chelsea, and poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso chose it as a place for philosophical and intellectual exchange.

It is also known as the place where the writer Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning in 1953, and where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols may have stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death on October 12, 1978.

Leonard Cohen’s song “Chelsea Hotel” is about an encounter he had with Janis Joplin in one of the rooms.

Famous visitors and residents of the Chelsea Hotel include:
Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Patti Smith many others.