Goodbye to the Chelsea

Oh I have been a very bad blogger. I have neglected my blogging duties for close to a month now. I have all kinds of excuses but I won't resort to that, I'll just give it my best shot to try to get back on track!

So what got me motivated  to start blogging again? The closing of the Hotel Chelsea that's what. I have to put my two cents in and say how sad it is. That rock 'n roll, vagabond, bohemian mecca...closed. The Chelsea has a very long and storied history and rather than reciting it all to you I'll include this link that says all that you need to know. It really does have an intriguing past and if you have a moment to spare it is worth reading about.

For as long as I can remember I have always wanted to stay at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. There's a magic about the Chelsea, a bohemian siren call. Once you have fallen under the spell it will never let you go. I finally got my stay in the Chelsea, back in March of 2009. The heyday of rock 'n roll decadence and the vagabond feel had come and gone but no matter, there was still enough gritty charm to have me hooked. From the moment that I walked through the door and into the art filled lobby I was a goner. It was as amazing as I had hoped. Out bellhop was named Angel. He took us up to the fourth floor in a rickety old elevator and showed us to our room telling us on the way to make sure to go to the top floor and work our way down to see all of the incredible art in the building. As it turns out our room, room 424, had been the haunt of Leonard Cohen, he of the fame of writing the song Chelsea Hotel No. 2 about his affair with Janis Joplin. The room was huge and inexpensive and wonderful. In the room and in the halls the paint was peeling, the lights were dim but no matter because the atmosphere was perfect. So many smells...pipe tobacco, incense, bacon frying...so many sounds...a piano playing somewhere, pipes clanking, voices muffled behind closed doors. And at night strange thumps and bumps that I am pretty sure came from something not of this world. Seriously. Just like Angel suggested we did walk all of those floors and hallways and were blown away by the artwork...paintings, photographs, scribbles on the walls. We even managed to "accidentally" end up on the roof which was another adventure in and of itself.

The following year in March I stayed at the Chelsea again, this time in room 105, former home of Edie Sedgwick. If you don't know about Edie she was one of Andy Warhol's factory girls, Bob Dylan's lover, a debutante who died young and lost and alone of a drug overdose. She had a habit at the Chelsea of passing out with her cigarette still lit and catching her bed on fire. On our first night in her room Caleigh's blanket kept shooting sparks...static electricity? Or Edie? I like to think that it was the latter. But anyway, when we arrived in our room it was without some of the furniture but it showed up very quickly with the explanation that our room had just been used to film an episode of Law & Order. Sure enough when the episode called Gods & Insects, or something like that aired, there was our room! This time we were at the front of the hotel with a balcony near the big "Hotel Chelsea" sign. We had another amazing stay and had every intention of returning again but alas, that now can not be.

From the New York Times ..."Part of the allure of the Chelsea, beyond the creepy yet tantalizing feeling that the place is thick with spirits, is that from the inside looking out, New York can still feel gritty. Its cavelike hallways are lined with paintings, striking collages and old electrical wiring caked with innumerable coats of paint. A palpable heaviness lingers, especially in the first-floor room where Nancy Spungen was staying with her boyfriend, Sid Vicious, when she was stabbed to death in 1978. Artists, photographers, composers and producers still live there, making the place part art colony, part living museum."

Among the many that have called the Chelsea home whether for a night or two or as a residence include

 Mark Twain, O. Henry, Dylan Thomas, William S. Burroughs,  Leonard Cohen,  Arthur Miller,  Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams,Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac (who wrote On the Road there), Thomas Wolfe,The Grateful Dead, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Jeff Beck,  Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Thunders, John Cale, Édith Piaf, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper,  Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Sid Vicious. Charles R. Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, committed suicide in his room at the Chelsea on September 21, 1968. Dylan Thomas collapsed in Room 205 at the Chelsea on November 9, 1953, and died a few days later in the hospital. Madonna lived at the Chelsea in the early eighties, returning in 1992 to shoot photographs for her book, Sex, in room 822

    No one knows what the fate of the Chelsea will be but it seems pretty certain that it will be very unlike the Chelsea that I know and love when it's doors re-open.   No rooms are being rented to guests at the moment. As a matter of fact the last of the  guests that were staying there were kicked out. The residents of the hotel have been allowed to stay but have not been told what to expect. The guest room doors have been painted white and padlocked shut. All of the artwork has been removed and no one knows what is to become of it. The hotel will be closed for a year or more while "renovations" take place. What a shame.


The Chelsea...

Just a smidgen of the art...

Up on the roof...

Roaming the halls...

The lobby...

And here is how it looks now...
(from the Hotel Chelsea blog)

And last but not least... I love this  little video by Julia Calfee about the hotel. It's just over 7 minutes long but has some great photos showing life in the hotel. Because after all, the Chelsea was not just a hotel, it is home for one hundred or so people. I can only imagine how strange it must be for those residents now. With the guests gone, the tourists popping into the lobby gone, the hotel staff gone and now all of the artwork gone from the walls.

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