The old freight warehouses stand between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and the High Line runs above them.
What Chelsea looks like
was built through the middle of the blocks rather than over an avenue, so it runs between buildings instead of above traffic. The warehouses it was made to serve are still there underneath it and beside it.
Freight came first. The city let trains run at street level along Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue from 1847, and enough people were killed that both avenues were called Death Avenue. The railroad hired riders on horseback to wave flags ahead of the trains. One count in 1910 put the deaths along Eleventh Avenue at 548. The viaduct opened in 1934 and 640 buildings came down to make room for it.
Trains loaded inside the buildings rather than at the kerb. on Eleventh Avenue between 27th and 28th Streets dates from 1891, and the on West 26th Street was finished in 1931 with track running into its ground floor. The old Nabisco plant a few blocks south is now .
The last train ran in 1980. Galleries took the buildings over from the late 1990s and there are more than two hundred of them now, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues from 16th Street up to 28th.
East of Ninth Avenue the blocks are older and residential. Clement Clarke Moore sold his family's estate off in lots in the 1830s. Don Alonzo Cushman finished the Greek Revival houses at in 1840, facing the seminary lawn. opened in 1930 with doormen dressed as London policemen.
Films shot in Chelsea
The Empire Diner and the Hotel Chelsea have both been filmed in, and both are open.
Men in Black II, 2002
Agent J takes Laura Vasquez to the Empire Diner at 210 Tenth Avenue, on the corner of West 22nd Street. The dining car was built by the Fodero Dining Car Company in 1946. The owners who took the place over in 1976 put a small stainless steel Empire State Building on the roof and painted EAT on the wall behind it, and both are still there.
Manhattan Murder Mystery, 1993
The hotel where the body turns up is called the Waldron in the film. Its exterior is a building on East 17th Street and the interior is the Hotel Chelsea at 222 West 23rd Street. The Chelsea was built between 1883 and 1885 as apartments and became a hotel in 1905. It closed for renovation in 2011 and reopened in 2022.
What Chelsea can double for
Chelsea can stand in for Manhattan's West Side freight district, a loft and gallery neighborhood and New York rowhouse streets of the 1840s.
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