Politics
You Can Buy a Piece of the Famous Hotel Chelsea Sign
The neon sign that hung alongside the West 23rd Street hotel is going up for auction, letter by letter.
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll find out about a famous neon sign that is about to be auctioned. We’ll also get details on raids by federal agents who seized the cellphones of several top officials in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams.
Credit…Guernsey’s
Once they spelled the name of a hotel that the singer Patti Smith and the artist Robert Mapplethorpe lived in and that she called “eccentric and damned.”
That was when the tallish neon letters reigned, spelling the name of Hotel Chelsea in brighter-than-bright reds and whites.
Now an auctioneer plans to sell them: the letters from the word “hotel” one by one, and the name “Chelsea” as a single piece. In preparation for the auction, he shoehorned an H from “hotel” into his office on the Upper East Side.
“That sign beckoned to the world that this was a place of free thought, creative goings-on, a raucous lifestyle,” said the auctioneer, Arlan Ettinger. “When you said ‘the Chelsea,’ you had these visions of Warhol and Arthur Miller and Bob Dylan, all hanging out.”
