Back Beats #5: Trip advisor: The bohotel
Wherein articles from the archive in which music and the literary find common currency earn a fresh airing
It may not have had five stars, but its legendary house guests had star qualities that trump any tourist rating guide. In this piece, originally titled ‘Inside Hotel Cornucopia: I do want to go to Chelsea' and first published in Words of Warner on September 14th, 2009, we pay a visit and check-in at the hippest of hostels with a host on hand…
IT MAY have lost its title as the tallest building in Manhattan as long ago as 1899, but there is little doubt that, for most of the twentieth-century, the Chelsea Hotel retained its reputation as the highest. Its multi-colourful story, as home to both cultural giants and subterranean renegades, marks it as a place where experiment – with drugs and with drink, with creativity and with life – was little less than an everyday event.
Certainly, if you’ve an interest in rock’n’roll, a concern with literature and poetry, or just a general fascination with American culture and the arts, there are few more intriguing spots to spend time than in a building that has been a base for a gallery of authentic artistic greats and also a place where a parade of notorious roisterers let their hair – and guard – down.
Among those who have taken up residence at the West 23rd Street premises over several eras are author Thomas Wolfe, playwright Arthur Miller and composer Virgil Thompson. Throw in, too, that extraordinary triumvirate from the other side of the Atlantic – poet Dylan Thomas, novelist Brendan Behan and the Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious – and you begin to get a flavour of the eclectic and exotic clientele to whom the Chelsea has merrily opened its Downtown doors.
And that still excludes an array of stellar names who have also enjoyed a relationship with this 12-storey, late Victorian, and still remarkably solid, monument. Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Janis Joplin, Ryan Adams and Rufus Wainwright have all had connections; so have the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke.
Andy Warhol set his infamous flick The Chelsea Girls, with star Nico, here and Woody Allen has used it as a location. Nor should we forget that ultimate English eccentric Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant and inspiration for Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York’, who took a room for decades. Then there’s Dee Dee Ramone’s bizarre novel, Chelsea Horror Hotel, set on-site.
I’d never been to the Chelsea till this summer, only imagined its famed gothic stairwell, the extended, pale lemon corridors and the nooks and crannies where typewriters were furiously tapped, canvases were daubed, and hard liquor and harder stuff still were imbibed to keep the creative juices flowing and the party in full swing.
Today, the hotel has conceded something of its louche and austere air. The lobby is splendid, in essence an extraordinary exhibition space where idling residents sit in the shadow of an impressive and diverse art collection – a digitally pixellated re-make of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a familiar Larry Rivers’ painting based on a Dutch cigar box and a series of amazing hanging sculptures that make the foyer feel more fairground than waiting room.
Yet, even with a gentrified glint, the Chelsea endures as a working project with a special atmosphere. As a functioning hotel, it remains more bohemian than boutique and continues to provide rooms for those operators who would find scant welcome at more traditional inns. There are flats allocated to artists, photographers and musicians; there is a pure Addams Family roof-space, as well, with the Deco splendour of the Empire State Building incongruously in view, where movie-making goes on.
But the long-held practice of long-term lets is in decline: the hotel is now more about bedrooms and suites of rooms to hire for a night or a few days rather than a quasi-apartment block or a co-op community for those outside the social mainstream with books to write or songs to pen or paintings to complete.
The Chelsea changed ownership not too long ago and the commercial prerogative, while not overwhelmingly obvious or stiflingly apparent, appears to be higher on the agenda than when Sixties rock bands made it a natural port of call, a spot to crash and burn, on hitting the dreaming spires of Manhattan.
Furthermore – a sign of the times, for sure – the hotel now runs occasional tours, three-hour epics that are well worth the $40 entry fee. Jerry Weinstein, who has worked for the venue for many years, is the maître d’ and leads a group up and down, around and about, this kaleidoscopic labyrinth, where history hangs heavy and most of the white-washed walls carry artworks by past – and even present – tenants.
The pleasure is that the Weinstein tour opens doors, of course, and various Chelsea artists had agreed to meet the touring group in their studios. American experimental film-maker Sam Bassett, the British painter David Remfrey and Portuguese camerawoman Rita Barros were along several practitioners who played host, showed their work in progress and answered questions about what they do and life in this celebrated building.
Ethan Hawke’s suite, now vacated, offered an insight into New York life for a well-established and cultish actor. The rooms – living room, sleeping quarters, kitchen, bath-room – are furnished with tasteful if life-worn pieces, period objets that are more Fifties chic than contemporary flash.
The faded, jaded demeanour of the upper levels convinces you that drama still lurks around that unlit corner, beyond that shaded doorway. When you are reminded, too, that Sid Vicious’ girl-friend Nancy Spungen did die in the hotel and see the room where this junk-tinged tragedy was enacted, the Chelsea evokes the spine-tingling nuances of a pulp detective novel or the submerged menace of a film noir thriller.
If there is a certain quality of cob-webbed salon or the ambience of a rather run-down conservatoire, the somewhat world-weary shabbiness cannot conceal that flavour of genuine mystery or obscure the vein of authentic magic that feeds your imaginings. As your own footsteps echo on the stairs, you can hardly help recalling that you walk in the imprint of Wolfe and Cohen, Miller and Joplin, Arthur C. Clarke and Sam Shepard. And that is an unmissable, if vicarious, thrill.
Finally, do not miss out on the hostelry next door, once the tour ends. El Quijote is a long-barred, deep-set drinking hole and restaurant where the beer is cold, the Margaritas are served in huge pitchers and the tapas are excellent, a perfect way to mope away an afternoon and reflect on the Chelsea Hotel and its unique cast of players.