The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Peer inside a gothic icon of old New York
In the first of a new series, Mark C O’Flaherty tells the epic saga of the Hotel Chelsea, home to the stars
You probably know already that it’s where Sid killed Nancy, and Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. Hotel Chelsea in New York is a gothic icon of old New York, and its remodelling from infamous bohemian dive into boutique hotel has become a saga as epic as any in its 137-year history. Legal wrangling between its owners, city officials and 48 long-term tenants has seen the hotel closed to guests for 10 years, but a court case this month gave the green light for the refurbishment to continue.
For over a century the Hotel Chelsea embodied a unique downtown experience. I remember the first time I visited it in the 1980s. I’d seen so much footage of its wrought-iron balconies and weathered white and red neon signage that turning the corner from 8th Avenue on to West 23rd Street felt like my first time in front of a muchreplicated piece of pop art.
The Chelsea represents a lost New York. Its acid green strip-lit hallways and wrought-iron staircase have been the backdrop for pearl-clutching shenanigans. Peggy Guggenheim hosted a lunch here with an up-and-coming and perpetually drunk Jackson Pollock, who projectile vomited in the dining room, while the late Quentin Crisp – being interviewed for the 1981 BBC Arena documentary on the place – recalled that “the first time I stayed, it was just for five days, and there was a robbery, a fire and a murder.”
In the same documentary, William Burroughs eats lapin à la moutarde with Andy Warhol – both were closely associated with the hotel for years. Warhol’s 1966 Chelsea Girls was threeand-a-half hours of improvised scenarios in various bedrooms. Tedious though it is, it predicts reality TV by decades and its louche characters add much to the hotel’s reputation.
The mythical qualities of the Chelsea are partly by design. It was built as a residential co-op building inspired by French utopian socialist philosopher Charles Fourier, ending up (until a subsequent sale in 2011) in the hands of the Bard family, who embraced all things bohemian. The last and most famous manager, the much-loved Stanley Bard, offered artists rooms in exchange for paintings and empty promises of future payment.
From Arthur Miller to society couturier Charles James, the Chelsea has housed a Catholic mix of kooks and creatives. In her book Inside the Dream Palace, Sherill Tippins recalls the interior of composer George Kleinsinger’s penthouse. The creator of the children’s musical Tubby the Tuba “turned his flat into, literally, a jungle, with 12 foot trees from Borneo… a five-foot iguana, skunk, monkey and eight-foot python.”
He was no outlier. Queen of New York nightlife Susanne Bartsch has been in residence on the seventh floor for 40 years and I have visited her many times. She has transformed three adjoined apartments into a warren of murals, mirrorballs, “Chanel red” walls and wardrobes full of fantastical fashion. “I like the idea of living in a hotel,” she says. “I have the illusion that I can take off at any time.” While she has been unable to run venues because of Covid, she has been Zooming up a storm with her club kids online.
I went to see a production of Cowboy
Mouth at the hotel a few years ago – apposite, as it’s where Sam Shepard and Patti Smith wrote their thinly veiled autobiographical play while having an affair, in 1971. Watching it here gave it a sense of place and history, if nothing else (and really, not much else).
One part of the hotel I’ve not seen is its rooftop, originally laid out as grand Victorian gardens. The current owners have ripped them out to make way for a very un-bohemian cocktail bar with a view, but a curious tile-roofed pyramid structure remains, originally an inhouse clinic for residents. For years it was the penthouse apartment for glam rock oddity Jobriath, the first openly gay pop star signed to a major label, touted as America’s answer to David Bowie. America wasn’t ready for him, he turned to acting, then prostitution, and died from Aids the year after the Chelsea’s centenary, in 1983, aged 36.
Vice is a recurrent theme in the hotel’s history. Back in the 1990s, a friend of mine took her then-boyfriend to the Chelsea for the night, inspired by the scene in 9½ Weeks in which Kim Basinger heads to room 426 for a liaison
Its acid-green strip-lit hallways have been the backdrop for pearlclutching shenanigans
with Mickey Rourke and a prostitute (nerd fact – Basinger kept the key and got more than £1,000 for it when she sold it at Bonhams in 2015).
Without a filmmaker’s artful lens, the reality was a rock-hard bed, a grim interior and a view of a brick wall from the window. My friend took her date for a cocktail nearby and they went home. Like a lot of things, sometimes the idea is better than the reality. And the Hotel Chelsea is a truly great idea.