It's where:
Arthur C. Clarke wrote
2001: a Space Odyssey;
Bob Dylan wrote "
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands";
Arthur Miller wrote
After the Fall;
and
Robert Hunter wrote
Stella Blue.
It's been home, in its hundred-year plus history (built in 1883), to Mark Twain,
Sarah Bernhardt,
O. Henry,
Hart Crane,
Nelson Algren,
Willem de Kooning,
Jasper Johns,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Jane Fonda,
Charles Jackson,
Milos Forman,
Edie Sedgwick,
Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
Brendan Behan,
Thomas Wolfe,
Edgar Lee Masters,
Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon,
and a slew of others.
For a good article on the Chelsea, see Helen Dudar's article "It's Home Sweet Home For Geniuses, Real Or Would-Be," in The Smithsonian, December 1983, p. 94.