One night at the Hotel Chelsea: Inside the modern iteration of the cultural icon
When the taxi began indicating to turn onto West 23rd street, I took a deep breath that, despite my best intentions, would do absolutely nothing to steel my nerves or regulate my excitement. I’d been fizzing all day, all the prior day too, when I’d got on an early flight for this moment. I was turning 27, and I was doing it at The Chelsea Hotel. I could not be cool about that.
This is a very personal way to start a journalistic article, but it has to be. As the taxi turned the corner, my right arm, with ‘Chelsea Hotel No.2’ tattooed on it, was pushed against the window as I leaned in. It was the same arm that wrote my university thesis, my final school essay, and countless articles for Far Out’s Chelsea Hotel Files all about the holy hub of 20th-century culture. It’s the same arm that turned the pages over and over on repeated reads of Just Kids, or Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls, or Dee Dee Ramone’s Chelsea Horror Hotel. It was the same arm, connected to the same hand, that seconds later was cupping my face when I saw its famed neon sign and immediately, and somewhat embarrassingly, began bawling by the Leonard Cohen plaque on the door. The doorman watched on with a kind smile — they see this stuff every day, it would seem. For a place with such a legacy, my story is no different. They will see a version of me again and again and again.
For so many, this is a pilgrimage that an ever-growing swath of inspirationally indebted people fascinated by the place are desperate to take. In terms of hotels, it has to be the most culturally rich venue on the planet, with more stories per square foot than almost anywhere else. As the interest in the icons who frequented the halls never seemingly wanes, neither does the interest in the Chelsea. Similar to the legacy of spots like CBGB or Studio 54, it’s a place that is just as much of a character in the history books as it is a location. But the Hotel Chelsea has a unique and complex edge — it’s still standing.
But that’s also what makes it so anxiety-inducing, prompting these big deep breaths I’d been taking since booking the room. The hotel that its devotees have read about was a beatnik hub, a stronghold against capitalism where artists thrived. Then, in 2007, Stanley Bard, the man who truly made the history of the Chelsea what it is due to his willingness to trust artists and not instantly kick them out if the rent payment came late, was ousted. It was the start of a dark period.
The place was in financial disrepair and began falling into the hands of one bad owner after the next. There have been several lawsuits filed against them as these new hands took over the hotel and set about squeezing it, trying, often cruely, to rid it of long-term residents in favour of quick and easy money, either washing its history clean, stealing it and selling it off in auctions, or making it a cheap branding note. It was horrible and painful for all involved: residents, past residents, and fans. I watched on across the pond, accepting that my dream of crossing the threshold was dead. Then it reopened, this time as a premium hotel.
Staying at the Chelsea, in its smallest and simplest room, will set you back around $500 a night. When Patti Smith moved in back in the day, she paid $55 a week. It would be incredibly easy to get caught up on that fact and start ranting away about how the place is ruined, how it’s no longer that beatnik refuge and that the place should still be simply opening up its doors to the riff raff of the arts scene, swapping portfolios for board and rejecting the elite. One of the key reasons for my deep exhalations was that I was terrified I’d walk into that lobby and simply be hit by a sterilised venue now selling its rough and rowdy history to the five-star set. But upon entering, that next inhale was now scented by old velvet, decades of perfume pushed into the walls and the undertone of every cigarette once lit by every idol who passed through, lingering deliciously in the carpets and the aura, I knew that really, the Chelsea had been saved — sometimes rescue requires readaptation.
To embrace the Chelsea in its existing form, you must first embrace what William Benton, the musician, DJ, and hotel’s resident tour guide, had to face too. It’s no longer the run-down venue he first came to, but as he took us up to the rooftop first and then walked us down, floor by floor, cherished corridor by cherished corridor, he pointed to the corners where its charm lives on. They’re corners that the typical luxury set guest with limited knowledge of the history might miss, but for those there to connect with a legacy, it is still there to find in artwork, wall tiles, door details or even tender examples of simple, functional craft turned into cultural heirlooms.
Its legendary staircase is perhaps the ultimate example of that, and the lifeblood of the venue. Still a feature that would pass no health and safety regulations, but luckily, the building and its iconic iron bannisters have landmark status, allowing them to remain as the centre point the hotel’s history and ongoing universe spins around. They’re in all the photos, they feature in movies like Leon: The Professional, the hands of heroes have touched them and they have a net at the bottom, first it was there to catch bodies when they were inevitably flung from the top floors during fights, now they catch iphones dropped by excited visitors.
In a spot so heavily weighted with the genius of art, naturally, the wall are adorned with some of the finest pieces. The story goes that Stanley Bard would trade places to stay for paintings, and even while that wasn’t quite as prominent as legend would have you believe, it still means that the archive is extensive. They weren’t artworks held hostage, though, and the new owners are freeing them as well as still gathering more.
Each and every floor, lining each bit of wall, are offerings given to the place across decades and no matter whose hands they came from, they’re treated with the same reverence in a beautiful nod to the way the hotel treats its guests; famed and unknown. A rare Warhol sits next to a newly gifted modern piece. One of Benton’s own photographs is displayed in the same position in one hallway as a Basquiat is in another. Current staff members have their new paintings on show, picked simply because the new management is seemingly just as passionate about encouraging creativity as the Bard administration was. Benton says that this is only a tiny fraction of the hotel’s mass collection and that things will rotate in and out over time. It makes me want to come back each month to wander it like a gallery again.
It might seem trivial to be as besotted with a doorway as simple as the ones found at the Chelsea. They’re nondescript, they bare no real markings of who or what came before – but you sense it and it’s staggering still.
We took the elevator on the left up. When we wander down to floor four, Benton pauses us in the left hallway, points to room 424; Leonard Cohen’s room. He then points across the hallway, 411; Janis Joplin. The elevator we got? That’s where they met, and the iconic story of ‘Chelsea Hotel No.2’, etched into my arm, took place. It’s a similar story as we approach the rooms of Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. All I can do is stare at the simple dark wood, starstruck by nothing but a door, a plain old door, but also the weight of that.
Behind those doors though, the legacy lives on both in artists stopping by for their own pilgrimages, but mostly by the long-term permanent residents who remain. On floor one, Benton’s voice hushes. When an old woman comes out of her room, I watch him get respectfully shy as he says his hellos, asks his how are yous, and quickly walks us back to the landing. The infamous Sid and Nancy room is around there, and that woman knows it well. She was there, she was in the police report, and she’s sick of hearing about it.
Instead, her new favourite hobby in her fourth decade living here is to pop her head out of her door and express that to the tourists, telling them to move on already. That’s what this place is all about, far more than the tired old question of ‘which room is it?’ Because ‘which room is it?’ is a question the hotel is no longer interested in answering, and that’s precisely why its new iteration works so well.
Only one room in the entire place has any level of acknowledgement of its history: the Thomas room, with a tiny plaque at the door. The rest are a mystery. The truth is, the hotel could easily fall into becoming a showy and, frankly, ugly version of memorabilia mining. The point isn’t to call up and say, “Hello, Hotel Chelsea? Yes, I’d like to stay a night in the Leonard Cohen room, please.” The point is to come, stay, see which ghosts you get and make friends with them if you want to, just like all of those iconic residents did, all making different art and seeing the hotel as a beacon for something unique. Only creative energy united them, and for that reason alone, the hotel was worth saving.
The morning after, I had a coffee in the lobby. After following a night feasting at El Quijote like Patti Smith did on days she came into rare money, followed by filthy martinis in the luxurious cocktail bar like the new clientele can, I woke up early to reconvene with the past, to sit there and write like Burroughs did. Connecting with the ghosts in the still bustling entryway, I inhaled instead this time. A big lungful of the place. At peace with the fact that the modern actuality of the Chelsea Hotel is different to the setting of the myths that hooked me, but still hungry with the same appetite for the unique energy spoken of in each bit of art I’ve consumed from it; the exact taste that’s still to find there.
