Chelsea was the name given by Captain Thomas Clarke in 1750 to his estate that stretched from 19th to 28th Streets from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River.

Clement Clarke Moore, his grandson, who is best known for his poem, "A Visit From St. Nicholas," divided the estate into lots around 1830.

Some sense of its once elegant past can be seen in the fine brownstone streets on the north and south sides of the full-block General Theological Seminary between 20th and 21st Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

The seminary is the "soul" of Chelsea, its major institutional facility with an attractive group of 19th Century collegiate buildings surrounding a central mall. Its frontage on Ninth Avenue created a major neighborhood controversy when it erected a low-rise building in the 1950s of little distinction. The controversy reared again a few years ago when the seminary entered a deal with The Brodsky Organization, a major developer of residential high-rise "luxury" buildings in the city to redevelop the avenue frontage with some new academic space and a mid-rise structure with luxury condo apartments.

The plan was met with widespread community opposition about its height despite the fact that several nearby buildings were higher. Eventually, the Seminary and the Brodsky significantly lowered the height of the project with the result that the seminary received far less revenue to carry out needed restoration of its facilities. The opening of the Hudson River Railroad along 11th Avenue in 1851, however, began to change the area significantly as warehouses, breweries and slaughterhouses were erected in its wake along the western edge of the area by its extensive piers along the river.

Twenty years later, the city’s first Elevated line opened along Ninth Avenue at about the same time that a theater district began to flourish on West 23rd Street where the Grand Opera House was erected on the northeast corner at Eighth Avenue. The opera house also served as the headquarters of the Erie Railroad that was owned by financier Jim Fisk and was the scene of his funeral after he was shot by Edward S. Stokes who was also involved with Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield. The opera house, which served as a RKO movie theater in its waning years, was demolished in 1960 to make way for the 2,820-unit Penn Station South housing complex that was developed by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, whose worker toiled nearby in the Garment District to the north.
BR> In 1862, Edith Wharton, who would become the author of such books as "The Age of Innocence", was born in a brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street that was converted into a store in 1882 by Henry J. Hardenbergh, the architect who would later design the Plaza Hotel. In the 1870’s and 1880’s, the area was convenient to the then very fashionable Gramercy Park and Madison Square areas, but a "vice" district also emerged in the 20’s and 30’s along the Avenue of the Americas, which was then, of course, Sixth Avenue. Although the theater district would soon move north to the Times Square area, Chelsea became something of a "Bohemia" for many artists, although by the turn of the century Greenwich Village would assume that title.

In the 1870’s, Sixth Avenue became the city’s most fashionable shopping district and fortunately many of the great buildings erected for the famous stores still survive and many were restored for other commercial uses in the 1980’s. Among the best are 655-671 Avenue of the Americas between 20th and 21st Streets that was built in 1875 as the Hugh O’Neill Dry Goods Store and was designed with a lovely and quite formal cast-iron facade by Mortimer C. Merritt.

Another major store was the Siegel-Cooper Dry Goods Store at 616-632 Avenue of the Americas, built in 1896 and designed by DeLemos & Cordes, which had a center court with a fountain by Daniel Chester French that was a popular rendez-vous and also served as a military hospital during World War I. This emporium, which advertised itself as "The Big Store - A City in Itself," was the grandest of six major stores along this stretch. The same architects also designed the former Adams Dry Goods Store at 675-691 Avenue of the Americas in 1900. One of the city’s first cooperative apartment buildings and Chelsea’s most famous landmark was the Chelsea at 222 West 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a 12-story, red-brick, Victorian Gothic-style structure with wonderful balconies that were made by J. B. and J. M. Cornell. It was built in 1884 and designed by Hubert, Pirsson & Co. Among its many illustrious restaurants over the years have been writers Mark Twain, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Brendan Behan, artists John Sloan and Jackson Pollack, composer Virgil Thompson and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Andy Warhol’s 1966 movie, "The Chelsea Girls", was shot in the building, which was converted to a hotel.

Not long after the turn of the century, movies began to be made in the area’s old lofts and theaters.

Its numerous major landmarks such as the great former department store buildings along Ladies’ Mile centered on the Avenue of the Americas south of 23rd Street, the Chelsea Hotel and London Terrace apartment complex on West 23rd Street and the Episcopal General Theological Seminary block on 21st Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and the Joyce Theater on Eighth Avenue at 18th Street, and the imposing Starrett-Lehigh industrial building on West 27th Street have been matched by the area’s many interesting restaurants, pleasant townhouses, converted loft buildings and new residential construction that began in the 1980’s.

In 1930, the 1,670-unit residential complex known as London Terrace opened on the block bounded by 23rd and 24th Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Designed by Farrar & Watmaugh, the attractive red-brick buildings formed two high-rise slabs between a midblock garden and had many amenities included a large swimming pool and a rooftop recreational area overlooking the Hudson River that was decorated in oceanliner style. When it first opened, the attractive complex had doormen dressed as London bobbies. The buildings replaced a very attractive row of four-story houses set back in large front yards across from the 19th Century Clarke mansion.

In 1931, the Starrett-Lehigh Building was erected on the large block bounded by 26th and 27th Streets between 11th and 12th Avenues. Designed by Russell G. and Walter M. Cory and Yasuo Matsui, the sprawling, 19-story industrial building is widely considered a modern landmark for its bands of windows, truck elevators and curved corners.

In 1934, the 11th Avenue railroad, which was used for freight and was the scene of so many accidents that the avenue was known for a while as Death Avenue and required a "cowboy" to ride on horseback with a red flag ahead of every train, was replaced by an elevated line west of Tenth Avenue. The Ninth Avenue Elevated line was torn down just before World War II. The white-tile, slanting facade with portholes of the National Maritime Union Building at 346 West 17th Street is another unusual building. It was built in 1966 and designed by Albert C. Ledner & Associates. It is now a hotel at the northern end of what has become known as the Meat-Packing District that extends south two blocks below 14th Street and is the city’s hottest nightlife district mostly because of two wonderful architectural conversions. The Chelsea Market is a full-block enclave of connected 19th Century buildings that now contain many gourmet good stores and famous restaurants. It is between 15th and 16th Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues. It is across Ninth Avenue from the enormous full-block building that formerly housed the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and was converted a few years ago to a first-class office building. Across from the Chelsea Market is the Porter House, a modest addition to a small warehouse that used to belong to Austin Nichols, one of the city’s finest wine importers. The addition was designed by FLank Architects and it is slightly cantilevered and has vertical strip lighting that makes it Chelsea’s Lighthouse.

Chelsea today is full of surprises as changing patterns of development have stirred its "pot" vigorously.

Located between Midtown and the West Village, this neighborhood offers convenience and good public transportation. South of Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, the stores of Herald Square and the Garment Center and north of Greenwich Village, Chelsea is close to the Midtown office district but also not far from the many attractions of downtown.

Its lack of cohesiveness, however, has not obliterated all its charm and in the late 1990’s it was undergoing a renaissance with an influx of art galleries, seeking less expensive space than was available in SoHo, and a major new waterfront recreational facility, Chelsea Piers, that was re-introducing many New Yorkers to the area.

It also benefited greatly from the burgeoning popularity of the Flatiron District just to the east that spilled over into Chelsea. The Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion at 49 West 20th Street on the corner of the Avenue of the Americas is a modest church structure designed by Richard Upjohn in 1879 that was converted to the Limelight Disco, which was closed for a while in the 1990’s because of alleged drug activity. The conversion of the interior was quite interesting and effective. It eventually closed and recently was converted to retail uses.

The area’s best conversion was the Joyce Theater at 175 Eighth Avenue. The Art Deco-style conversion by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer & Associates in 1982 from the 1942 Elgin movie theater created the city’s nicest small revenue for dance and the theater became the home of several of the city’s most important modern dance companies and helped spark a renaissance along Eighth Avenue in this area with many new attractive restaurants. One of the major institutions in the area is the Fashion Institute of Technology between 26th and 28th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, which services the nearby Garment Center to the north. For many decades, Eighth Avenue in the high 20’s had numerous Middle East and Greek restaurants and nightclubs.

Many townhouses in the area were converted into rooming houses, but some are being reconverted as are numerous loft buildings and while most blocks are uneven architecturally they usually have at least an interesting building or two. The Chelsea Piers added a great deal of new vitality to the West Chelsea neighborhood at a time when art galleries were getting priced out of SoHo and began to discover the large industrial spaces of West Chelsea.

In one of the most rapid neighborhood transformations in the city’s history, Chelsea became very "hot" at the beginning of the 21st Century, thanks in part to rezoning of the former Flower District on the Avenue of the Americas that led to the sprouting of numerous tall residential towers and the explosion of art galleries.

To top it all, two residents in the area started a campaign to make a park of the elevated High Line and they were extremely successful. The park, which was modeled on one created several years previously in Paris, sparked an enormous amount of new construction along its way, included many small but quite spectacular architectural projects such as the HighLine 519, 245 Tenth Avenue, Vesta 24, and 100 Eleventh Avenue and 200 Eleventh Avenue and the IAC Center and many others, making the Far West Chelsea area an architectural mecca.

Two of the projects, the IAC building on the southeast corner of 19th Street and West Street and 100 Eleventh Avenue on the northeast corner at 19th Street were two of the most spectacular new buildings in the city in the first decade of the millennium. The former’s sail-like shape was designed by Frank O. Gehry, the architect of the shiny curves of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the latter had about 1,700 windows of different sizes set at different angles with a rounded corner designed by Jean Nouvel.