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The Guests Who Never Left

The Chelsea Hotel at 222 West 23rd Street was built between 1883 and 1885 as one of New York's first cooperative apartment buildings — a radical social experiment before it became the most storied hotel in American cultural history. Dylan Thomas was carried out of room 206 in November 1953, a few hours after telling a friend he had just consumed "eighteen straight whiskies" at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street; he died at St. Vincent's Hospital four days later. In October 1978, Nancy Spungen was found stabbed to death in room 100 while her boyfriend Sid Vicious slept nearby. Arthur Miller lived at the Chelsea after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe. Thomas Wolfe typed portions of "Of Time and the River" in a room whose number no record has preserved. The hotel's ornate Victorian facade — red brick with wrought iron balconies, each one slightly different from the last — was designated a New York City landmark in 1966, which is why it still stands.

Three miles north, at 59 West 44th Street, the Algonquin Hotel opened in 1902 and became famous in the 1920s for a group of writers who gathered at its Round Table every day for lunch. Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, and Edna Ferber were among the regulars — they called themselves the Vicious Circle and spent six years trading insults, writing reviews, and drinking in a city that was still technically dry. The original Oak Room where they met is still intact. The Algonquin has kept a resident cat since the 1920s — always named Hamlet or Matilda in alternation — and the current Matilda has her own publicist. Former manager Frank Case, who ran the hotel from 1902 until 1946, is said to appear occasionally in the corridor outside the former Rose Room, which guests now report as the sixth floor hallway near the elevator bank.

The Jane Hotel at 113 Jane Street in the West Village was built in 1908 as the American Seamen's Friend Society Sailors' Home, offering cheap lodging to maritime workers. In April 1912, the hotel housed survivors of the RMS Titanic — crew members who had been rescued by the Carpathia and brought to New York received temporary shelter here while the White Star Line arranged their passage home. The rooms, originally designed for sailors sleeping in bunks, are still just large enough for a single bed. The building's austere brick exterior gives no indication of what happened inside it, and there is no plaque. A StoryHunt through Manhattan's haunted hotel corridor connects these addresses with the real events that made them famous — not ghost stories, but the documented history of extraordinary lives that ended badly in rooms that are still rented by the night.