Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel

by Sherill Tippins

  Epilogue: Second Life

  Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

  Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.

  —LEONARD COHEN

  NANCY SPUNGEN’S MURDER was a catastrophic event for the Hotel Chelsea, as it seemed to validate every disturbing rumor anyone had ever heard about that ill-behaved residence at the heart of New York City. “The hotel will never get over it,” Stanley Bard told me flatly three decades later. And, in fact, it is rare to this day to come across a reference to the Chelsea that doesn’t mention Sid’s and Nancy’s deaths.

  For five years following Nancy’s murder, the hotel’s owners and its residents struggled particularly hard to regain their footing while the surrounding city moved through its own darkest years. In 1983, as part of the recuperation process, the Hotel Chelsea community collaborated on a centennial birthday celebration for the former cooperative, although, in characteristic laissez-faire fashion, they missed that date by a year. At the event, Mayor Ed Koch, Arthur Miller, the New York Public Theater director Joseph Papp, and numerous other New York cultural luminaries gathered in the lobby, decorated for the occasion with palm trees and a stunning new tapestry by Juliette Hamelcourt, and were treated to a musical tribute to the hotel composed by Virgil Thomson’s former protégé Gerald Busby and played by a trio of the Chelsea’s musicians; a reading of “The Chelsea Hotel,” a poem by resident literature professor B. H. Williams; and several performances by other Hotel Chelsea denizens, including Joe Bidewell and Abdullah Ibrahim. Then the audience moved to the seventh floor to see the former Living Theatre and La MaMa choreographer Merle Lister’s Dance of the Spirits, a haunting tribute to the phantom wraiths and elemental spirits lingering in the Chelsea’s halls. Finally, Stanley Bard unveiled a new plaque honoring Arthur Miller that would be placed on the Chelsea’s façade alongside those of Dylan Thomas, James Farrell, and Brendan Behan.

  As the 1980s became the 1990s, the hotel’s long tradition of mentorship began to reassert itself. Virgil Thomson continued to hire young men as secretaries and archivists, providing them with musical instruction and important introductions, until his death in 1989. The playwright Arnold Weinstein met a young pianist from Kentucky named Scott Griffin in the elevator and invited him to assist in a collaboration with Arthur Miller and the composer William Bolcom on an opera based on Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Over time, Griffin became so close to Miller that he was granted permission to produce the playwright’s final work, Resurrection Blues, staged in London following Miller’s death.

  Well-known artists and activists, less prone than the general public to concern themselves with the hotel’s scandalous past, continued to rent its excellent workspaces and take inspiration from its design. The artists Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente, the poet James Schuyler, the actors Ethan Hawke and Isabella Rossellini, and musicians from Rufus Wainwright to Marianne Faithfull to Madonna spent time at the Chelsea as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first. Following Virgil Thomson’s death, the artist Philip Taaffe, whose work is strongly influenced by the paintings of Harry Smith, moved with his family into Thomson’s beautiful apartment and filled it with the composer’s furniture that he bought back at a Sotheby’s auction.

  As always, the rooms provided the space, permission, and captive audience needed for sharing one’s work as well as creating it. The artist Elizabeth Peyton held her first significant exhibition in her suite; the performance artist Penny Arcade staged her cathartic play A Quiet Night for Sid and Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel in one of the hotel’s actual rooms. For many residents, the hotel itself became a favorite subject. The great New York School poet James Schuyler penned an ode to the wrought-iron flowers that greeted him from his balcony at the beginning of each day. Resident photographers Rita Barros, Claudio Edinger, and Julia Calfee published images of Chelsea life in books about the hotel. Dee Dee Ramone, who moved back to the Chelsea in the early 1990s to kick heroin, wrote the novel Chelsea Horror Hotel; Ethan Hawke created the independent film Chelsea Walls; resident writer Ed Hamilton mixed outrageous fiction with equally outrageous fact in his Legends of the Chelsea Hotel; and Abel Ferrara contributed his own take on the Chelsea with his documentary Chelsea on the Rocks. Most recently, in the pages of his critically acclaimed best-selling novel Netherland—the story of a Dutch businessman living at the Chelsea Hotel—Joseph O’Neill showcased some of the more eccentric aspects of both the building’s resident population and its aging architecture.

  The Chelsea population continued to serve as surrogate family—a family that relied on morning wake-up calls sung in waltz time (“It’s nine o’clock in the mo-o-o-rn-eeeng”) by longtime front deskman Jerry Weinstein. When Gerald Busby’s lover Sam Byers died of AIDS and the grieving composer fell into a downward spiral of drug addiction and debt, Stanley Bard put off demands for past-due rent and found the social service workers needed to get Busby back on his feet. When the artist Bettina Grossman began to show signs of being overwhelmed by the pressures of life, her neighbors stepped in to clean her apartment and frame and hang her work. The old Beat raconteur Herbert Huncke found a caring staff at the Chelsea, along with an unlimited supply of young people eager to hear his stories and provide him with cash. Patti Smith returned for a brief stay at the Chelsea following her husband’s death. When Ethan Hawke’s marriage to Uma Thurman foundered, Bard provided him and his children with a free suite for a month on the condition that Hawke do what he could to get Uma back.

  George Kleinsinger’s ashes were tenderly scattered over his rooftop garden by his widow and neighbors when he died. Shirley Clarke returned to the Chelsea to surround herself with friends as Alzheimer’s overtook her in her final years; following her death, her ashes, too, were scattered in the garden of her former pyramid where she had hosted so many gatherings over the years. Most famously, in 1991, Harry Smith left the cottage Ginsberg had provided him on the grounds of Naropa University in Colorado to accept the Grammys’ Special Merit Award for the Anthology of American Folk Music as a symbol of his “ongoing insight into the relationship between artistry and society”; having announced, “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true, that I saw America changed through music,” Smith elected not to return to Naropa but to go back to the Chelsea Hotel. He remained there, in a room obtained for him by Raymond Foye and paid for by the Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation, until his death at St. Vicent’s Hospital on November 27 of that year. The Smithsonian got his collection of Seminole garments, and the National Air and Space Museum got his paper airplane collection; Allen Ginsberg arranged for the cremation of Harry’s body, and his ashes were placed in Rosebud’s care.

  The hotel seemed to exist in another dimension, as old-timer Alphaeus Cole lived to be 112 and some guests, such as the artist George Chemeche, arrived to spend a single night there and ended up remaining for fifteen or twenty years. Entire new generations were born at the Chelsea and grew up there. The fashion stylist Man-Lai Liang relied on the switchboard operator to notify the neighbors when her babies were born and on the maids for childcare advice; Aurélia Thiérrée, Eugene O’Neill’s great-granddaughter, who grew up all over Europe, called her tiny room at the Chelsea “a palace” and “the first place I ever felt at home”; Viva’s younger daughter, the actress Gaby Hoffmann, credited her ease with living and working outside the norm to her childhood at the Chelsea Hotel, where people focused on “individuality and expression and people being themselves at any cost.”

  Over the decades, the Chelsea’s residents weathered together whatever the world outside its doors threw at them, from John Lennon’s murder to the AIDS epidemic to the horror of 9/11. But as Reagan was followed by Bush, Clinton, and then another Bush (and, in New York, as Ed Koch gave way to David Dinkins, then Giuliani, then Bloomberg), it became impossible to ignore the fact that while the Chelsea denizens had won some cultural battles, they’d apparently lost the war. With the arrival of the new century, New York’s economic classes were as widely
separated as they had been in the Gilded Age. The GNP had more than doubled since 1980, but most Americans’ income had actually declined. Mergers, deregulation, outsourcing, and stripping the unions of their powers—all the tools in the toolboxes of the descendants of those “men in their private railway cars” who had so worried William Dean Howells when he meditated on Edward Bellamy’s super-corporate nineteenth-century utopian dream—eventually led to an economic crash as painful, pervasive, and long-lasting as the terrible 1873 crisis that had inspired the Chelsea’s creation.

  In New York, as always, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The city’s cooperative apartment buildings, while never more ubiquitous, had long ago lost their association with communal living and had become instead a “celebration of capitalism” as co-op boards worked to maintain their buildings’ reputation for exclusivity to keep share prices up. To rent and not buy in New York became “a radical act,” the novelist Joseph O’Neill pointed out, particularly as prices continued to soar, bankruptcies increased, and the size of the city’s homeless population grew to equal what it was when Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives. New York City, and Manhattan in particular, became unaffordable for the artists, the eccentric, the elderly, the young, the reckless, and all the other members of an eclectic population whose diverse imaginations had produced the raw material needed to create one of the world’s great cultures. One by one, the old bars, coffee shops, music venues, and other New York gathering places shut down, and artists who were not yet successful moved out of the neighborhoods they had helped develop—and were not particularly missed, it would seem, by the city’s mayor or the major cultural institutions.

  At the Chelsea, Stanley Bard came under increasing pressure from a number of his fellow board members—the heirs of the original syndicate organized by David Bard—who wished to see their profits increase in line with the skyrocketing value of their real estate on Twenty-Third Street. At issue were the building’s poor physical condition—particularly after a piece of Alphaeus Cole’s ninth-story balcony fell to the street, injuring two people—and Stanley’s well-known habit of accepting artwork in lieu of rent or ignoring rent charges altogether. Bard did what he could to address their concerns: he instituted a long-range repair program, redecorated certain rooms (though visitors questioned the snail motif of one room’s wallpaper and the bubblegum-pink paint used in the newly dubbed “Britney Spears Room”), and repeatedly ordered the removal of Sid and Nancy graffiti from the brass plaques on the hotel’s façade. His partners were not satisfied, however. In 2005, they succeeded in removing Stanley from the board of directors, and in 2007 the board summarily fired him as manager and banished him from the building itself, despite his work of fifty years.

  With Bard removed, the board put the hotel up for sale, giving rise to a series of ugly confrontations with residents as repairs were postponed, tenants evicted, and the beloved roof gardens stripped bare—flowerpots, dining tables, artists’ ashes, and all. A sale was slow in coming, owing to a general reluctance among hotel professionals to take on a landmarked property with the Chelsea’s reputation, not to mention the 2008 recession. But finally, in August 2011, one of New York’s leading real estate firms, the Chetrit Group, headed by the New York billionaire Joseph Chetrit, succeeded in purchasing the hotel at a price of nearly $80 million.

  The Chelsea’s iconic place in the city’s collective psyche became clear in the weeks that followed, as the real estate firm was besieged by questions from local and national reporters demanding to know how the city’s best-known home for artists would be transformed. The Chetrit Group, famously secretive, refused to divulge its plans, but since the hotel’s entire staff was laid off, the art stripped from the walls and carted away to storage, and the hotel itself shut down “for renovations,” it was clear that the changes would be extensive. The remaining tenants—those with legal protection from eviction—roamed empty halls, passing doors of unoccupied apartments now padlocked and painted a streaky white, which gave the hotel’s interior the disconcerting look of a voodoo ceremonial. “I am crying as we speak,” one resident wrote to me. “The housekeeping staff are not here; the thug security people are gathering in the lobby like they’re ready for urban warfare.” Another neighbor, dismayed by the emptiness of the building and its lack of security, added, “I feel like an old lady on the frontier.”

  As I write these words, nearly two years have passed since the Chelsea Hotel was closed. With its interior gutted and no new tenants or transient population filling its lobby and rooms, the building sits like a corpse in its niche on Twenty-Third Street. The monthly Hotel Chelsea invitation-only poker game has been canceled; the new management has pulled the plug on the monthly orgy; and Rick Kelly of Carmine Street Guitars has come around to collect some of the hotel’s discarded beams to use in making a few custom guitars. “Lately I think of Mayor Koch’s remark about himself (years ago)—‘I’m a liberal who was mugged by reality,’” writes one survivor, Raymond Foye, who once partnered with Francesco Clemente to operate a publishing firm, Hanuman Books, out of the hotel. “That’s the Chelsea gang—it was a lovely bubble provided by Stanley Bard, but now we’ve been mugged by reality.” Of course, the Chelsea being what it is, rumors continue to fly: the Chetrit Group plans to sell the building; the building will be turned into high-priced condos; the Bard family is assembling investors to help them buy it back. A flurry of lawsuits feed these flames: the owners suing tenants for nonpayment or underpayment of rent, the tenants suing the owners for illegal construction practices, the current owners suing the previous owners for an alleged misrepresentation of the value of the hotel. Beyond the rumors, one can see an emerging reality in the implacable march of construction permits requested for a bar on the roof, for a third elevator, for barriers on the balconies to prevent people and pets from traveling room to room.

  Perhaps neither rumors nor reality will matter in the end. Perhaps the Chelsea’s eventual fate doesn’t depend entirely on its new owners, or even on city agencies; maybe it depends on those individuals who are willing to understand the hotel’s history and imagine its future. As Foye wrote, “Duchamp once noted that when a work leaves the studio the artist relinquishes his or her hold on how the work will be seen and interpreted; and, moreover, all of those different interpretations will eventually constitute a work’s meaning . . . Something like this happened to Duchamp himself, and it is also becoming true for the Chelsea.”

  Each day, dozens of visitors arrive to photograph the façade of the Chelsea Hotel, or, more frequently, to photograph themselves in front of its iconic doors. Some have come to relive memories of time spent in the building. (“I just had to take a look,” says a man in dark glasses and skintight jeans. “I had some times in there, I can tell ya. Lucky to be alive.”) Others are seeing for the first time the magic place they’ve read about or heard of in song. Outside New York, people read hotel residents Ed Hamilton and Debbie Martin’s Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea blog, write fan fiction about the hotel, and stage performances in the virtual Hotel Chelsea created by the musician Michael Brown in the online community Second Life. The spirit of this nineteenth-century tribute to the power of creative living has moved into the imaginations of the people who love and understand it. Walt Whitman wrote, “Over and over thru the dull material world the call is made.” The Chelsea is waiting for those with the ears to hear and the imagination to respond.

  In the present moment, though, the Chelsea’s residential population has decreased from more than three hundred to about eighty households—the same number, coincidentally, that existed in the original Chelsea Association Building and the number Charles Fourier once deemed the minimum necessary to create a true community. Tested by adversity, determined to remain, and extremely diverse in terms of finance, occupation, degree of success, personality, and age, the survivors are as united in fighting threats to their life together as the tightly knit phalanxes of ancient Greece after which Fourier’s communities
were named.

  What will happen remains to be seen: The conditions are there, the potential is there, and the people are there for the Chelsea Association to flourish again. The future lies ahead.

  Appendix: Cost Equivalencies

  Date Item Cost Today’s Dollar

  Equivalency

  1860 Philip Hubert’s fortune $120,000 $3,350,000

  1870 Tweed’s appropriation for chairs $200,000 $5,580,000

  1870 Official tally of Tweed’s thefts $45,000,000 $800,000,000

  1875 Ingersoll’s restitution to New York City $1,000,000 $21,100,000

  1881 Price of Hubert’s first co-op apartments $4,000 $90,800

  1882 Cost of Chelsea Association lot $175,000 $3,970,000

  1884 Cost of a family apartment at the Chelsea $7,000–$12,000 $166,000–$284,000

  1884 Monthly rent at the Chelsea $41.67–$250 $986–$5,910

  1896 Top-floor art-studio rental $60/month $1,660/month

  1905 Single Chelsea room, no bath $1.50/day $ 39.60/day

  1905 2-bedroom suite with living room and bath $5/day $132/day

  1935 E. L. Masters’s suite $17/week $279/week

  1937 Thomas Wolfe’s suite $34.67/week $563/week

  1937 Wolfe’s hoped-for book advance $10,000 $162,000

  1938 WPA artists’ allowance $23.86/week $381/week

  1938 Virgil Thomson’s first Chelsea room $60/month $958/month

  1942 Jackson Pollock’s allowance $150/month $2,070/month

  1965 Christo’s two floors in SoHo $70/month $499/month

  1966 Cost to make Chelsea Girls $1,500–$3,000 $10,400–$20,800

  1966 Chelsea Girls initial earnings $130,000 $901,000

  1967 Typical Chelsea Hotel room rate $10/week $67.30/week

  1967 Solanas’s advance for S.C.U.M. $2,000 $13,500