Why was the Chelsea Hotel such an influential hub?
“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,” Leonard Cohen sings about Janis Joplin and the hotel that gives his track ‘Chelsea Hotel No.2’ its name. Bob Dylan was there too, singing “Staying up for days at the Chelsea Hotel writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you” in ‘Sara’. Jefferson Airplane also has a song for the place, belting out “Sometimes I feel like I’m leaving life behind” as they enter the establishment in ‘Third Week In The Chelsea’. One hotel provided a world of inspiration to New York’s artists, but why?
It’s a fascinating phenomenon. The establishment in question sat at 222 West 23rd Street in New York and was home to hoards of significant musicians and cinematic and literary figures at one point or another. Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Edie Sedgwick, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Madonna, Nico. The list goes on. In the 1960s and early ’70s especially, the hotel was a hub of the finest artists New York or broader counterculture had to offer. Just down the street from Max’s Kansas City, a bar where Andy Warhol held court and The Velvet Underground or the New York Dolls were like house bands, it became a permanent home for many artists as they made their masterpieces.
In her memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith writes in depth about her time living at the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Maplethorpe. It was while staying there that she met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, two figures who encouraged her to continue writing and where she met the musicians who would inspire her to put those words to music. Smith described the hotel as being home to a “unique energy” that seemed to draw artists in and sometimes keep them there.
The building kept her there for several years as she found her feet as an artist in the late 1960s. Then, in the wake of tragedy after the passing of her husband, Smith returned to the hotel briefly, proving just how powerful that energy must have been. From her descriptions, it seems like there was simply nowhere else in the world like the Chelsea, drawing images of the hotel in its heyday as a kind of magical playground where the brightest, most interesting and wildest minds of her generation mixed.
“The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder,” Smith said of the place. “Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.” But why did they all flock there?
The answer is simple: it was cheap. Despite sitting in what is now one of New York’s most vibrant and sought-after areas and being rich with the history built decade after decade, the hotel in the 1960s was incredibly accessible to even the most brokest of artists. That was all down to one man, Stanley Bard.
Remembering the hotel’s entryway, Smith wrote about “the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent”. After becoming the manager in 1964, when he took over from his father, Bard handled the hotel in a unique way. It already boasted an artistic reputation and a strange history, but the new manager wanted to build on it. With that idea planted in his mind, he began taking art in exchange for rent, or at least very cheap rent.
When Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe showed up at the hotel, they quite literally exchanged their portfolios for a room key. The hotel was boldly decorated with all the artwork Bard had been given, allowing residents to trade in art in exchange for boarding as the manager seemed to truly, and rightfully, believe that these figures would one day make it if only they had a place to thrive. The manager was an eccentric figure. He’d change room rates based solely on how much he liked the resident and had an incredibly lax response to late or non-existent rent payments. It was precisely the kind of set-up struggling artists needed, so the reputation spread, and rooms quickly filled up.
From then on, it was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy. As more artists took up residence at the Chelsea, more art came out of the place. As more artists lived there, the more interesting and exciting the atmosphere got, inspiring the inhabitants even more. As even more artists moved in, the better of a place it was for them to hide away and create their work, almost allowing a kind of anonymity thanks to the sheer chaos of the place.
The amount of art made at the Chelsea Hotel is staggering. Within its walls, Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch and poet Dylan Thomas even died there after writing his final works. Andy Warhol filmed his movie Chelsea Girls about its residents, also prompting the Nico song of the same name. The Grateful Dead performed a show on its roof, while playwright Arthur Miller wrote an essay called ‘The Chelsea Affect’ after the hotel’s mysterious impact on artists.
It’s a place that has gone down in history with an incredible and immeasurable impact on culture. Unlike anywhere else in the world, it’s no wonder that Patti Smith, amongst its other inhabitants, reflects on the place so fondly, stating, “I loved this place, its shabby elegance, and the history it held so possessively”.
