DOORS WITH A PAST
ONE hotel’s trash could be many a history buff ’s treasure.
On Thursday, Guernsey’s will auction off 55 individual doors from the Chelsea Hotel rooms where Joni Mitchell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jackson Pollock and others once lived, after a homeless man rescued them from the garbage heap.
“I was shocked,” Jim Georgiou tells The Post of finding the doors in 2012, when they were chucked to the curb during the hotel’s still-ongoing renovation. “These doors obviously have an amazing history.”
A few years after salvaging them and hauling them to a friend’s storage unit, Georgiou called Guernsey’s, which has a reputation for outside-the-box sales. The doors are expected to fetch anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 each, with half the net proceeds going to City Harvest (which provides food for homeless and hungry New Yorkers) and the rest to Georgiou.
Georgiou, 60, now lives in a single-occupancy room near the Chelsea, where he was once a resident. From 2002 to 2011, the Massachusetts native and then-martial arts instructor lived in No. 225 — a worn-out looking suite with chipped paint and no bathroom — where Bob Dylan resided between 1968 and 1972.
Georgiou was often behind on rent, and in 2011, a few years after new owners took over the hotel, he and his dog, Teddy, were evicted. The pair slept outside the hotel on West 23rd Street, hawking records on the sidewalk during the day. But Georgiou stayed friends with many of the hotel’s old tenants, using the hotel’s bathroom and showers and gossiping with the construction workers doing renovations. That’s how he got the tip about the doors.
“A couple friends of mine helped me — one had a truck,” says Georgiou of the clandestine operation. “We were only able to save a portion.”
The doors sat in a Bronx storage facility for five years, while Georgiou spent hours at the library, researching the hotel. He was able to connect 22 of the 55 doors with celebrities, including 1960s It girl Edie Sedgwick, who nearly set the hotel on fire after she fell asleep with candles lit. (That same room she was in was also where Andy Warhol filmed his avant-garde classic “Chelsea Girls.”) Another door led to the room where Jack Kerouac typed out “On the Road” on one single scroll, and another to Madonna’s digs in the early ’80s, to which she returned in the ’90s to shoot her erotic picture-book, “Sex.”
All of the doors sold will come with a certificate of authentication and information on the person or people who lived behind them.
“The hotel was an incredible place, filled with creative people,” says Georgiou, who still sells records outside the hotel. He hopes people will recognize “the importance of these doors [and] what the legacy of the Chelsea meant.” “Chelsea Doors” will be on view through Thursday at the Ricco/ Maresca Gallery, 529 W. 20th St. For more info, go to Guernseys.com.
Many of Chelsea Hotel’s resident stars have moved on, but they left these behind By RAQUEL LANERI