The rebirth of New York’s legendary Hotel Chelsea

The rumours are true. New York’s Hotel Chelsea, that infamous nexus of all things bohemian, is finally opening its doors more than a decade after an abrupt change in ownership and a lengthy renovation. Legions have fallen in love with its tawdry glamour. Nearly as many have fled in horror from its scummy bathrooms and haunted corridors. But love the Chelsea or hate it, everyone who has stayed here has a relationship with it: once the old dowager gets her talons into you, she doesn’t let go.

My own association with the Chelsea began during a summer downpour when a lightning bolt flashed just as I leaped over a puddle on West 23rd Street. Glancing up, I saw the mammoth red-brick edifice silhouetted against the roiling clouds in all its gothic glory, with the full-grown trees of its roof garden waving in the wind like women in distress. “What is that place doing there?” I asked myself. How had a gargantuan artists’ hostelry survived so long in one of the world’s most materialistic cities?

So began a decade-long deep dive into Hotel Chelsea lore. Many stories that surfaced were bizarre – the 19th-century slum girl dispatched to Bellevue asylum for claiming she lived at the glorious new hotel before it had even opened; the concert pianist’s wife who cut off her hand and placed it on the bedside table before leaping from a window to her death. But what became clear was that, from the beginning, the Chelsea was a home for eccentrics and the artists were there by design. Its architect, a French-born idealist named Philip Hubert, had conceived of the Chelsea as a cooperative where residents could decrease their living expenses by sharing the costs of housing, fuel and food – thereby freeing up time for creative pursuits.

The building he completed in 1884 provided soundproof walls to separate practising pianists from working novelists. It had an elaborate roof garden for stargazing and performing; exquisite stained glass, painted murals and a skylit central staircase for aesthetic grace. Reports soon proliferated of the director David Belasco lounging with the Frohman brothers in the lobby, Mark Twain pontificating in the dining room and Isadora Duncan dancing upstairs. Even after the turn of the century, when the cooperative failed financially and the Chelsea became a residential hotel, its aura of Gilded Age utopianism continued to appeal to New Yorkers’ idealistic side. It was to the Chelsea that socialites Lizzie Bliss and Abby Rockefeller flocked to take lessons from the mysterious artist (and bigamist) Arthur B Davies – to study his collection of Picassos and Cézannes, and plot the creation of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Great Depression was good for the Chelsea (or at least for its artist-residents), as it succumbed to bankruptcy and was bought for a song by a syndicate of Hungarian immigrants headed by hotelier David Bard. He revered artists but lacked practicality – and so proved to be the perfect host for Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Thomas Wolfe and other alcoholics who had been banned from every respectable hotel in town. Some might complain about the noise of shattering crockery during Thomas’s domestic disputes with his wife; of Wolfe pacing the halls, reciting lines from You Can’t Go Home Again in the wee hours. Some might raise an eyebrow upon hearing Jane Bowles scream at her husband Paul, “I’ll get you for this; you’ve ruined my uterus!” during one of their visits en route to Morocco. Others might question the propriety of allowing a drunken Jack Kerouac and Gore Vidal to stumble upstairs and consummate their friendship in a room turned brothel-red by the neon Hotel Chelsea sign. But surely a piece or two of crockery could be sacrificed for the sake of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.

By 1960, when Arthur Miller retreated here after his separation from Marilyn Monroe, he found the hotel “nearly a slum”, furnished with cheap pieces from “Guatemala, maybe, or outer Queens”, and with “something like coal dust” crunching beneath his shoes. Yet he also found a flourishing artistic life: the composer Virgil Thomson producing extraordinary dinners from his wardrobe-sized kitchen for Edith Piaf, Leonard Bernstein, Frank O’Hara, John Cage and many others; and the composer George Kleinsinger entertaining Eartha Kitt, Katherine Dunham and newsman Walter Cronkite in the rooftop studio he’d transformed into a tropical jungle, with palm trees, a pet monkey and an eight-foot python. Soon, Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely would arrive, with their respective works “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto” and Homage to New York the result.

Creative chaos was not an atmosphere that Miller found conducive to good work, but he found he rather liked the Chelsea’s utter absence of social judgement – an open-door policy that placed long-haul truckers next to grande-dame sculptresses, letting the chips fall where they may. Still, life at the Chelsea was about to get much crazier, as David Bard relinquished his role as manager to his son Stanley – an impressionable young man who handed control over to the artist-residents like a teenager throwing open his parents’ house for a keg party.

These were the glory days – as Larry Rivers took inspiration from cigar-box labels and Claes Oldenburg advocated for art that “does something other than sit on its ass in a museum”, as marijuana smoke filled the lifts and laughter filled the corridors. Bob Dylan booked a room and began creating Blonde on Blonde. Joni Mitchell left Leonard Cohen, so he turned to Janis Joplin. Edie Sedgwick set her room on fire. The Grateful Dead staged a concert on the roof. In the lobby, Valerie Solanas hawked her book promoting SCUM Manifesto, the Society for Cutting Up Men, before taking off to shoot Andy Warhol.

Unfortunately, like his father, Stanley Bard seemed constitutionally unable to see what was broken at the Chelsea, much less fix it. As the 1970s dragged on, dealers roamed the halls, junkies occupied the bathrooms and tenants stepped over bodies – dead or sleeping? – to get to the stairs. Punk bands moved in; graffiti covered the walls; pieces of stained glass went missing. Then came the news of Nancy Spungen’s murder, followed by Sid Vicious’s death by overdose four months later.

Spungen’s murder, Stanley told me years later, was the Chelsea’s death knell. It took decades for the hotel to recover from the scandal – decades in which he hounded some tenants for rent while allowing others, whose work he admired, to pay with paintings or a show. Some got better – Dee Dee Ramone claimed he weaned himself off drugs here while writing the novel Chelsea Horror Hotel. Others got worse – the gay icon and singer Jobriath died at the Chelsea of AIDs.

In 2007, Stanley’s partners had had enough: they sacked him as manager and sold the hotel. It’s been a decade of tearing up floors and tearing down walls. But finally, the dowager of 23rd Street is ready for her comeback, having been redesigned as a smart hotel with apartments and revamped El Quijote bar by BD Hotels, the group behind much-loved NYC addresses The Bowery and The Jane. Who will occupy the new Hotel Chelsea? How easily will they mix with the remaining residents, not to mention the fabled spirits that haunt its rooms? Will rich and poor, famous and obscure, young and old mingle once again, enriching one another’s lives? I have so many questions. Only time can answer them. 

Address: 222 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011, United States
Price: Doubles from about £400