Among the guests and ghosts at the Hotel Chelsea

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 9 / November 24 -30, 2006

Notebook
Among the guests and ghosts at the Hotel Chelsea

By Suzanne Zionts

I remember you well from the Chelsea Hotel, you were famous, your heart was a legend
Leonard Cohen

In a time when many great New York rock and roll cultural landmarks are closing, as CBGB did earlier this month, the Hotel Chelsea still feels alive with legends. It seems like Leonard Cohen exists in the hotel sitting in an unmade bed with the smoke of lovers’ cigarettes hanging in the air. Sid Vicious is in the next room with his back against the wall. Music seeps through the crack under the doorway. Spirits exist here.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, the Hotel Chelsea (a.k.a. the Chelsea Hotel) was alive with guests checking in. An eccentric woman from Brazil with red hair was trying to get a room for a week. Another two young men from Australia were trying to extend their stay. There was an air of home in the center of the lobby with big soft chairs and bright works of art on all the walls.

The Chelsea Hotel has been a cultural icon Downtown since 1883 when it started out as New York’s first co-op apartment building. A wrought-iron staircase with a mahogany banister spans all 12 floors. There has been a glut of creativity born from the walls of the Chelsea Hotel. Many artistic legends have stayed at the Chelsea, from William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Thomas Wolfe, Sam Shepard and Dylan Thomas, to Bob Dylan. In addition, Diego Rivera, Dee Dee Ramone, Vladimir Nabokov, Joni Mitchell, Arthur Miller and Andy Warhol were all also guests at the Chelsea.

The art lines the lobby with modern bright light, but it’s the music that still lingers in the air. There are a few places in New York where you can hear the sound of many generations. It may cost $195 and up for a single room — depending on the time of year, day, week — and $275 a night for a studio with a kitchenette. Yet, the mystique and history of the Chelsea make the building feel bohemian even with rates that are definitely bourgeois.

Stanley Bard, the manager of the Chelsea Hotel, took over the position from his father in the mid-’60s. He has watched generations of families and artists grow in this space. The hotel is simply his passion. He tries to treat each one of his guests like a person and not a room key. He has spent his life trying to create an atmosphere that is more of a cultural community than a hotel.

“The misconception is that the Chelsea Hotel is a wild, flamboyant, kooky kind of hotel,” said Bard. “It is the most respectable, in reality, the most admirable, the most appreciated, the most intellectual type of environment that exists in this city or any other city.”

While some of the rooms are for permanent residents, there are also requests from people who just want to spend one night in this famous residence. They want to spend their honeymoons in the hotel. Bard said it’s “because of the fantasy of the hotel, because of the mystique of the hotel.”

Bard will neither admit nor deny that the Chelsea is haunted with the ghosts of famed artists. However, he did collaborate with his friend Ethan Hawke on a film on that particular subject, “Chelsea Walls,” in which those walls do indeed come alive.
Bard said that Hawke, “used the walls as a metaphor, if the walls could talk. Because the building itself has experienced so much, has seen so much.”

Although the Chelsea represents a piece of rock and roll history, to many it was just a place they grew up. Bard said that many children were born here and returned to their home 20 or 30 years later. Apparently, Arthur Miller’s daughter, Sarah, was born in the hotel. She came back to the hotel after graduating from Yale to remember her home.

“We are very fortunate, because a lot of the people who stay here became very well known people and are comfortable financially, so they could afford to stay here, said Bard. “I know a lot of artists that lived here 40 years ago that were poor struggling artists. Robert Mapplethorpe, the world-famous photographer, when he first came here, he didn’t have any money at all. I trusted him. He became world famous.”

He tries to help longtime residents of the Chelsea stay there as long as they want, because these are the people that helped create the whole feeling.

“I’m indebted to these people who travel throughout the world spreading glowing things about the hotel,” Bard said. “There are many stories that people came here, that the Chelsea brought them fortune or luck.”

Bard invited Leonard Cohen, a former resident of the Chelsea, to stay at the hotel for Cohen’s 70th birthday, but Cohen was on a spiritual retreat. Bard called Cohen “a beautiful person.”

Jo Prince, a first-time guest at the hotel from London said, “It’s a legend…. People at home know it when you say, ‘We are going to stay at the Chelsea Hotel.’ ”

Prince said that most people from London know the hotel for Sid Vicious, who died there. Prince also came from the same town as Dylan Thomas, and she found out that Thomas spent quite a bit of time at the Chelsea. He actually passed out in the lobby once.

“It’s completely different from anywhere else you go,” Prince said.

The Chelsea Hotel remains a place for the avant-garde. However, just like Hemingway’s favorite cafe, Deux Maggots, in Paris — where he could not afford to order anything but a coffee and a glass of Parisian tap water these days — the Chelsea has become a little too expensive for many up-and-coming artists. But its walls still hold Joni Mitchell writing “Chelsea Morning,” Bob Dylan strumming out “Sara” — singing about “staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel” — or Cohen writing about his broken heart in “Chelsea Hotel #2” that make it worth the money. The ghosts are still there, and the inspiration that created so many works of art, literature and music still remain in the walls of this historic New York hotel.