Topsy Turvey in New York: Hotel Chelsea in 2006 (Video)
New York’s fabled Hotel Chelsea is now open as a luxury boutique hotel. Dreaming Walls, the Martin Scorsese-sponsored documentary, however, paints a bleak picture of a decade of hell for its longtime residents while projecting the ghosts of the famous and infamous who made music, art, loved, lived and died there on its walls.
But my story was anything but bleak when I stayed there in 2006. That was a year before Stanley Bard, whose family had run the Chelsea for seventy years, was kicked out by a shareholder, triggering the hotel’s downward spiral. I got to know Stanley, who shared stories with me about the hotel and its guests and his life ambition to gradually remodel it and preserve its eclectic community. Alas that did not happen but after years of turmoil, Hotel Chelsea has been remodeled and reopened as a boutique hotel. Some 40 of the original residents still live there.
Scroll down for the story. Here is a video I shot in 2006, before the fall:
In 2006, I sat in the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea and watched artist David Combs trying to make order of the chaos. On his canvas, the Chelsea was a take me back to Kansas maelstrom of flying dogs and chairs.
“Everything’s up in the air, especially the people that live here,” said Combs. “That’s what inspires me a lot. It’s the energy that I get from the people who live here.”
Combs knew the dogs and residents by name, the current tenants of what, since the 1880s, had been an outpost for a galaxy of stars, flamed-out meteorites and misfits from the universe of artists and eccentrics: Mark Twain, O’Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Stanley Kubrick, Uma Thurman, Jane Fonda, Robert Mapplethorpe, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Robert Crumb, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Edith Piaf, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, he Warhol tribe, including Viva and Ultra Violet, plus a stew pot of Stalinists, Trotzkyites, “ashcan” artists, and others who enjoyed 15 or more minutes of fame. Dylan Thomas, drank himself to death there.
Stanley Bard
I heard cries: “Hey Stanley!”
Stanley Bard, whose family had run the Chelsea since 1938, was busy on the phone (Stanley was always on the phone).
“Stanley, chunks of ceiling are falling in my room”.
“Stanley, the hot water is off and I have a client with a head full of hair dye”.
My wife and I had checked in the night before and were assigned a room that could be described as being more crackhaus than Bauhaus. We complained. Stanley showed us another room, once occupied by Jackson Pollock, now decorated as if the artist awakened from a troubled sleep and splotched the walls himself. Leopard skin patterned robes hung in the armoire. Taking a chance on what our mental state might be after living a week inside of Jackson Pollock’s head, we made a deal with Stanley, threw open the windows to let some air in and headed off to breakfast. When we got back, the room was covered with a fine layer of powder from workers sandblasting next door. Stanley apologized and offered us a suite.
We got to know Stanley. Both of my grandfathers died before I was born, but I hoped they were something like Stanley, a kind gentleman with the patience to manage flying dogs and furniture and a Shakespearean cast of residents.
“It was one of the most important buildings built in this city,” said Stanley. “It was so important they named the area, the Chelsea area, after the building. It was the tallest building in New York when it was built, some hundred 50 feet high. Most of the city was farmland.”
“Mark Twain used to stay here all the time whenever he was in New York.”
Arthur Miller found refuge here after he broke up with Marilyn Monroe.
“He once said this would be this is the only place he would consider living. He was in a very fancy residence before coming to the Chelsea. And when he would go down to the front desk to get his mail, they required him to wear a jacket. He stayed here for nine years.”
“Arthur C. Clarke said he wouldn’t say anywhere else, even though his publisher wanted to put up in the Waldorf. He wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea.”
“Bob Dylan, John Lennon. Leonard Cohen wrote so many songs here. We’ve had a lot of things happening, mostly good in the hotel that I’m very proud of.”
Sid and Nancy
There was one incident he tries to forget, when punk rocker Sid Viscious allegedly killed his girlfriend in Room 100.
“He was an interesting person. I mean, first of all, everyone says he killed is his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, which he never did. I knew him as quiet, very much in love. He loved this girl. Every time they would go out, they would be holding hands, hugging and kissing. Believe it or not, they were writing a song about them committing suicide like a modern day Romeo and Juliet. And she did. And he didn’t go through with it. He moved to the East Village where he eventually OD’d. He pleaded with me to take him back. He wanted to die here in the Chelsea and I wouldn’t allow it. He was a quiet person when he was here. When he was on stage, he was a different, different individual.”
“Do you want to see room 100?,” asked Stanley. “Maybe next time,” I answered.
Staying here for a few nights, I got to know who the lifers were: a publisher up to his nose in books and manuscripts, a Sandra Bernhardt lookalike (maybe her) who cracked one-liners in the elevator, a prim interior designer, the lady with the two dachshunds. Walking the ornate ironwork stairwells I heard the murmur of voices. Of course, any hotel with such a history must have ghosts. Art from current and past tenants sometimes shouts from the walls. Mark Rothko, among others, traded art for rent. De Kooning, Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Julian Schnabel, Christo, the person that wrapped the Grand Canyon and Central Park, stayed here. I met an aging sculptress who walked the halls. She invited me into her apartment to see her work.
Stanley’s Unrealized Vision
“I wanted always to be known as a haven for the literary, to the creative, to the bohemian,” said Stanley, “and I struggled managing it and just keeping it the same. And that’s my lifelong ambition. And my children have been working here since they were children. And I’m trying to instill in them how important that this hotel is.”
“It’s the last vestige of I don’t want to say decency, I don’t want to say anything else, but I’m trying very hard to keep this hotel going in exactly the same way and tradition as it has been for a hundred years.”
Alas, that was not to happen.
A year later, in 2007, in the midst of the Bard family’s remodeling job, Stanley was booted out by a shareholder who began to evict tenants. The hotel sold in 2011 and was closed to guests. Long-term tenants, who were protected from eviction, screamed about the dirty demolition efforts.
Stanley, who was quite bitter, died in 2017. The doors were sold at auction. The door to the room where Bob Dylan wrote ‘Blonde on Blonde.’ sold for $100 thousand. The door to Room 424, where Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen had the tryst that inspired Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.” went for $85 thousand.
The Chelsea has just reopened as a boutique hotel. It retains some of its paintings. A few of he tenants of the old Chelsea remain and if you use your imagination, which you are inclined to do here, you may hear ghosts arguing, reciting poetry, singing or screaming “Hey Stanley: in the stairwells.
