New York’s Chelsea Hotel is closing for refurbishments, and the artists and musicians who made it their home are worried it will lose its bohemian appeal. But it did that long ago
AFTER HIS DIVORCE from Marilyn Monroe, the playwright Arthur Miller checked into the Chelsea Hotel, New York’s iconic celebrity flophouse, and ended up staying for six years. He crystallised the Chelsea’s spirit, atmosphere and notoriety in a single sentence: “There are no vacuum cleaners, no rules and no shame.”
Earlier this month, the landmark building, which gave its name to the surrounding area, was taken over by a developer for a reported price of €85 million. In lamentation of the fact that the Chelsea has closed its doors and is no longer taking guest bookings, one headline this week read: “Bohos go bonkers as Holiday Inn architect is brought in”. The fear is that the Chelsea will be refurbished as a luxury hotel or as expensive condominiums.
The hotel’s 100 permanent residents, many of them artists and musicians, will be allowed to stay, says the new owner, Joseph Chetrit. The architect brought in to supervise the refurbishment, Gene Kaufman, who once worked for the Holiday Inn chain, has said people “should not be nervous” about planned changes, as the hotel’s plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems all needed to be overhauled.
“The renovations will be more like a restoration: they will be subtle,” he said.
But the bohos remain fearful that their treasured Manhattan pied à terre, which is steeped in cultural history and was the scene of many a memorable artistic encounter and endeavour, will be upgraded to a designer haunt well out of their price range.
A local writer, Ed Hamilton, who lived at the Chelsea for more than 10 years, now writes the Chelsea Hotel Blog – The Last Outpost of Bohemia (chelseahotelblog.com); he has been documenting the changes with posts titled “The whitewash of the Chelsea Hotel begins” and “Chelsea Hotel lobby desecrated for fun and profit”.
Kathy McEwan, a local who visited the hotel this week, was dismayed to find all the artwork has been stripped from the walls of the lobby and staircases (some residents paid their room charges with their work), and the long-term residents were just shrugging their shoulders in a let’s-see-what-happens sort of way. McEwan said so many people were busy taking last photographs of the old lobby that it resembled a crime scene.
Neither Chetrit nor Kaufman responded to questions about the redevelopment.
Like almost everyone when they first pitched up at the Chelsea, when I visited, in both the 1980s and 1990s, I was dismayed by how much of a dive it is. The lobby was dark, dusky and uninviting, and the staff, long since tired of answering questions about which rooms Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen et al used to stay in, would typically respond to inquiries with a pithy “go f**k yourself”. The cheaper rooms were euphemistically “basic”. Open wires hung from the ceiling, the taps worked only when they felt like it and “intriguing” noises filled the corridors.
All the guests seemed to be cultural ghost-chasers; certainly from the 1990s on, the real bohos learned to stay away from the place and leave it to the coach trips of tourists ticking the Chelsea off their New York City itinerary.
The man at reception would wearily report that the most room requests he ever received were from people looking to stay in the room where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death, in 1978. The room was a suite (the Chelsea had some top-end accommodation); but the owners quickly subdivided it to deter punk tourists.
The same receptionist reported that people would request the room used by Mark Rothko – maybe they were hoping the artist had left a picture below the bed – and how others would arrive with a photocopy of the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No 2 and point to the lyrics: “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / you were talking so brave and so sweet / giving me head on an unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the street.” The request would be: “Do you still have this bed?”
And that’s what did for the Chelsea. It had long ceased to live and breathe. It had turned into a museum of memories.
Chelsea Hotel: They remember you well
In the early 1900s, when it was still seen as a desirable residence, the Chelsea accommodated Titanicsurvivors; it was a short distance from Pier 54, where the ship was supposed to dock in New York.
Even then it was known as an arty stop-off, with guests having included Mark Twain, O Henry, Sarah Bernhardt and Frida Kahlo. Visual artists saw it as a home from home: Mark Rothko (who used the dining room as his studio), Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns were long-term residents.
The writers Charles Bukowski, Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brendan Behan, Jack Kerouac and Gore Vidal were all regular guests, and Dylan Thomas was staying there at the time of his death, in 1953.
Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odysseywhile staying at the Chelsea. Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol and Iggy Pop were no strangers to it, as well as Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. And Bob Dylan "stayed up for days in the Chelsea Hotel writing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", as he recounted in his song Sara.
