We Knew It Well
Lola Schnabel in her Chelsea Hotel apartment, which was previously rented by her father, artist Julian Schnabel. You can see more images inside her room here.
From the outside, Chelsea Hotel looks as if it were the only building in New York that was flown in from New Orleans.
The lobby, which was once filled with tenant artwork, now only showcases a sculpture of a child on a swing by Eugenie Gershoy, who was a resident artist in the 60s.
Scott Griffin’s apartment featured artwork by Andy Warhol, a photograph of Arthur Miller by Andres Serrano, and a box set of The Thin Man.
Milos Forman (director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) remembers living on the eighth floor when the fire alarm went off one night and all of the tenants flocked to the stairwell to see what was going on: “The firemen had started to blast an incredibly powerful water cannon through the door of an apartment to extinguish the fire. From above we saw water running down the stairwell through the different floors, like a cascade. It was like Niagara Falls . . . a bottle of wine was passed around, and some joints, and everyone drank, smoked, talked, and watched the waterfall.”
The hallway of the 10th floor. “You could go to one floor and talk about theater with Stefan Brecht,” remembers former resident Scott Griffin, “and go to another floor and talk to Arnold Weinstein about poetry and then have dinner downstairs with Arthur Miller. There aren’t many buildings in New York like that.”
Also inside #205. “People do their best work here,” says Artie Nash, one of the last tenants to receive a lease from the previous manager, Stanley Bard. “But the spirit of the place, what inspired people to live here, has been drained.”
Artie Nash and Mimi Chen in apartment #205, which was writer Dylan Thomas’s final apartment. Thomas died one night when, as legend has it, he drank 18 straight whiskeys.
Another papier-mâché sculpture by Eugenie Gershoy in the lobby.
Carlson and Taaffe have tried to keep the apartment in its original state, or as close to it as possible.
Another shot inside Hamilton and Martin’s apartment, which is an S.R.O. room (meaning it has no kitchen and shares a bathroom with three other rooms). Still, there’s always room for a foosball table.
The kitchen inside #920. Thomson moved into the Chelsea in 1940, and his dinner parties “were the stuff of legend,” according to his New York Times obituary.
Artist Philip Taaffe and Gretchen Carlson with their children in their apartment, #920. “It’s one of the few apartments that wasn’t chopped up into little pieces when the hotel became a flophouse in the Depression,” says Carlson.
Another shot from inside #920, which was once composer Virgil Thomson’s apartment. Carlson and Taaffe moved in after Thomson’s death in 1989. Carlson said, “Virgil is still present in this place. Like a benign, gentle ghost. He died right here.”
The third-floor hallway in all of its unadorned glory, awaiting renovation. R. Crumb, a frequent guest at the hotel, said it was getting too expensive for him to stay there: “Manhattan is going to keep pushing in that direction, more and more expensive condos, apartments, hotel rooms. Then again, it’s always the end of some era in New York.”
Ed Hamilton, author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca (Da Capo), with his wife, Debbie Martin.
