CHELSEA
Located on the West Side of Manhattan, New York City. It is located to the south of Hell's Kitchen and the Garment District, and north of the Meatpacking District that centers on West 14th Street.
The former rural charm of the neighborhood was tarnished by the freight railroad right-of-way of the Hudson River Railroad, which laid its tracks up 10th and 11th Avenues in 1847 and separated Chelsea from the Hudson River waterfront. Clement Moore gave the land of his apple orchard for the General Theological Seminary, which built its brownstone Gothic tree-shaded campus south of "Chelsea."
By 1900, the neighborhood was solidly Irish and housed the longshoremen who unloaded freighters at warehouse piers that lined the waterfront and the truck terminals integrated with the raised freight railroad spur. The film On the Waterfront (1954) recreates this tough world, dramatized in Richard Rodgers' jazz ballet "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" (1936).
Chelsea was an early center for the motion picture industry before World War I. Some of Mary Pickford's first pictures were made on the top floors of an armory building on West 26th Street.
London Terrace was one of the world's largest apartment blocks when it opened in 1930, with a swimming pool, solarium, gymnasium, and doormen dressed as London bobbies.
Traditionally Chelsea was bounded by Eighth Avenue, but in 1883 the apartment block, soon transformed to Hotel Chelsea helped extend it past 7th Avenue and now it runs as far east as Broadway. The neighborhood is primarily residential with a mix of tenements, apartment blocks and rehabilitated warehousing, and its many businesses reflect that: restaurants and clothing stores are plentiful.
Chelsea is an increasingly significant art gallery district.