The death of a bohemian legend
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Emmanuel Dunand, AFP, Getty Images, Daily Telegraph
Mark Rothko lived there. Sid Vicious reputedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen there, Arthur Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there, and Leonard Cohen famously pleasured Janis Joplin there, giving rise to one of his most famous songs - and the most famous celebration in song of a hotel ever - "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet ."
For more than 70 years the Chelsea was the epicentre of louche, bohemian New York life. But no longer.
Earlier this month, New York's most fabled hotel was taken over by a developer named Joseph Chetrit for a reported price of $85 million, with a view to it being refurbished as a luxury hotel or as condominiums. It has closed its doors to new guests, and longterm residents are expecting eviction notices. The artworks that decorated the lobby and corridors, many donated by artist residents over the years, or accepted in lieu of rent, have been stripped from the walls. The ghoulish papier mâché model of a woman on a swing hangs over an empty lobby. Doors have been bolted, and staff have been fired.
IN MOURNING
All over New York, artists, writers, hedonists and ne'erdo-wells are in mourning.
When it was built in 1883, the Chelsea was New York's tallest building, a 12-storey landmark so notable it gave the surrounding area its name. The Chelsea was originally conceived as the city's first major cooperative apartment house, owned by a consortium of 10 wealthy families. After falling into bankruptcy in 1903, the building was converted into a mixed-use residence, which it has remained until the present day, with about 40 per cent of its 250 rooms reserved for hotel guests and the remainder occupied by long-stayers. Its geography was always odd, with accommodation ranging in size and quality from the palatial to the near-squalid - a hierarchy reflected in its clientele, which has traditionally ranged from wealthy bohemians and artists such as Larry Rivers and the composer Virgil Thompson, to impecunious punks and drugdealers.
Entering the Chelsea could be an intimidating experience. Its interior was gothic and gloomy, as if the ghosts of former residents were defying you to live up - or should that be down - to its notorious history. Most of the rooms were far from luxurious; water pipes banged, and electric wires dangled precariously. The corridors were once described as having "the charm of a Soviet-era mental ward." But the Chelsea had something that no amount of money or interior decoration could buy: a singular style and a unique legend.
From its earliest days, the Chelsea attracted literary and theatrical figures. Mark Twain and O Henry stayed there; so did Sarah Bernhardt and the artist Frida Kahlo. Rothko used the old dining room as a studio. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs were all regulars. And Jack Kerouac once booked into a room with Gore Vidal - the only recorded account of Kerouac spending the night with another man.
NO RULES
"This hotel does not belong to America," the playwright Arthur Miller, who lived in Chelsea for six years following his divorce from Marilyn Monroe, once wrote. "There are no vacuum cleaners, no rules and no shame."
"The Chelsea was a place with infinite layers of artistic heritage," says the British writer and cultural historian Barry Miles, who lived in the hotel between 1969 and 1972 after being taken there by Allen Ginsberg. Miles remembers being introduced to another resident, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, on his first day. "He had a big telescope in his room, but it wasn't trained on the stars but on the windows of the neighbouring apartments. He was an interesting man."
The presiding eminence of the Chelsea was Stanley Bard, whose family acquired the property in the 1930s, and who personally managed it for more than 50 years. A bohemian Medici, Bard saw it as his calling to nurture the hotel's reputation for eccentricity. A curator and patron as much as a hotelier, it was he who would often accept paintings in lieu of rent (a shrewd move in the case of Rothko and Larry Rivers), seldom objecting when artists sloshed paint on the walls and floors, and provide a sanctuary for waifs and strays.
"Stanley really did believe that art transformed the world and that it was a force for civilization," Miles remembers. "I think he saw it as his duty in a way to provide a home for these people. And he was ripped off by a lot of people as a result."
Bard tended to gloss over the more unsavoury aspects of the hotel's history. When Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death in 1978, presumably by Sid Vicious (he died of a drug overdose before he could stand trial), Bard subdivided the first floor suite where the killing occurred to prevent the room becoming a shrine. When another long-term resident died in his room of a drug overdose, Bard explained his disappearance by offering that he was "merely travelling" in Europe.
In the 1970s, when New York entered a period of recession and lawlessness, the Chelsea went into a corresponding decline.
Miles remembers being awoken one night by a banging at the door, and opening it to find a policeman, pointing down the hallway towards a dead body and asking: "What do you know about this?" It was a drug killing.
After convincing the policeman it was nothing to do with him, Miles went back to bed.
Anthony Wall, who produced an Arena film for the BBC on the hotel in 1981, spent several months living there. "It maintained a very high standard of eccentricity, but it could get you down. I remember a cockroach the size of a rhinoceros beetle that sat on the floor in my room for three days just looking at me."
Residents at the time included Nico, the Andy Warhol "superstar" Viva, Quentin Crisp and George Kleinsinger, the American composer best known for the children's composition Tubby the Tuba, who shared his apartment with his collection of reptiles, including a turtle in a glass tank, a 3.5-metre python and a pet alligator, and his 20-something girlfriend (Kleinsinger was in his 70s).
By the onset of the Noughties, the Chelsea's rackety bohemian charm was beginning to look out of place as the surrounding neighbourhood grew ever more fashionable. The hotel's death knell was finally sounded in 2007 when Stanley Bard was ousted in a boardroom coup. In 2010, the hotel was put up for sale.
The first harbinger of change came in April this year when a self-styled "party organizer" named Palagia was banned from throwing her monthly sex parties, which she had been staging for the past 11 years, "due to liability."
EVICTION NOTICES
The painter and filmmaker Lola Schnabel, the daughter of the artist Julian Schnabel, who has lived in the Chelsea for eight years, said Wednesday that she was expecting to receive an eviction notice soon.
"The building has been taken over by the worst type of people, the most greedy pigs. Nobody knows what's going to happen, but it's not very pleasant."
Long-serving staff have been summarily fired, she claims. "They're not taking the garbage out of the hallways, so the place stinks."
Gene Kaufman, the architect in charge of the redesign, has claimed that his plans are "more like a restoration," but residents such as Schnabel are not assuaged.
"The Chelsea is a cultural landmark," she says, "but all the spirit of creativity, all the poetry and the music that has come out of this place has just been bleached out in a matter of days. It's a tragedy."
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