Keeping It Colourful
Chelsea Hotel
The Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street has been home to more legendary creative disasters per square foot than any other building on earth. A new photo book reminds us what that looked like.
There are buildings that contain history and there are buildings that manufacture it. The Hotel Chelsea — that thirteen-storey Queen Anne Gothic pile on West 23rd Street, red brick and ironwork balconies, a slight air of having been designed by someone who lost their nerve halfway through — falls firmly into the second category. For roughly a century it did not merely accommodate artists and writers and musicians; it processed them, extracting from each intake something rawer, stranger, and more startling than they would have produced anywhere more comfortable. Comfort, the Chelsea understood, was the enemy.
The statistics of the place are almost numbing. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there in 1953, staggering out to the White Horse Tavern and back until the coma took hold. Arthur Miller lived in the Chelsea for several years after his marriage to Marilyn Monroe ended, and later wrote about the building's peculiar democracy — the way it housed Nobel laureates alongside people who would never, in the ordinary course of events, be let anywhere near a Nobel laureate. Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again in room 829. Mark Twain passed through. O. Henry was a regular. Virgil Thomson lived there for decades. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen occupied room 100, which ended badly for both of them and particularly for Nancy.
What this new photo book — assembled by Albert Scopin [author name uncertain; verify from source PDF] — manages to do is give the building back its texture. The photographs are not primarily of the famous: they are of the corridors, the stairwells, the peculiar light that falls through windows into rooms that seem to have been lived in by every generation simultaneously. You get the paint-encrusted radiators, the walls half-covered in decades of artwork left by residents who couldn't pay their bills, the lobby that functioned as a salon, a confessional, and occasionally a boxing ring.
The Chelsea was the only place where you could be genuinely famous and still have the electricity cut off for non-payment. — anon., former resident
Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids is the Chelsea's most celebrated literary document, charting the years she spent there with Robert Mapplethorpe in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She describes a world of radical informality: Janis Joplin might be in the lift. Leonard Cohen was two floors up. Jimi Hendrix passed through. Bob Dylan wrote "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" there, allegedly in a single sitting, which, given that the song runs to eleven minutes, implies either extraordinary facility or that he had a rather large table. What the photographs capture — and this is their considerable achievement — is the atmosphere that made all of that possible. The Chelsea was cheap, it was central, it was tolerant of behaviour that would have had you ejected from any ordinary hotel within the hour, and its long-serving manager Stanley Bard had a gift for accepting paintings or manuscripts in lieu of rent that amounted to a kind of informal arts patronage.
The building has had its difficulties in recent decades. A series of ownership changes and renovation projects have turned it into a battleground between the demands of historic preservation and the financial imperatives of Manhattan real estate. For many years it sat in a state of semi-completed renovation, its long-term residents locked in legal disputes with management, its corridors echoing with the sort of bitter correspondence that none of the previous inhabitants would have found time to write. It has since reopened as a functioning hotel, and the rooms are rather more expensive than they were when Sid Vicious was occupying one of them. Whether it retains the anarchic vitality that made it what it was is a question the photographs cannot quite answer.
What they can answer — and do, handsomely — is the question of what it looked like during the years when it mattered most. There is an image here that stops you: a long corridor at what appears to be three in the morning, a figure at the far end, indistinct, the doors on either side bearing the traces of a hundred years of repainting that never quite covered what was there before. Whether anything interesting was happening behind those doors, you cannot tell. The probability, given the address, is high.
The Chelsea exists now primarily as a legend, which is both its strength and its limitation. Legends are tidier than the thing itself — they flatten the boredom, the financial anxiety, the creative failure that is the majority of any artist's working life. The real Chelsea was also, on most days, full of people who were not producing masterpieces: they were just living there, cooking inadequate meals in cramped kitchens, arguing with lovers, struggling to find a pay phone that worked. The photographs in Scopin's book are generous enough to include some of that, too, and it is in those moments — the ordinary ones — that the building becomes most comprehensible as a place where people actually lived rather than a backdrop for myth-making.
The myth, of course, is part of the appeal. You would not buy a book of photographs of a mid-century Manhattan hotel if it had not produced the particular concentration of creativity and catastrophe that the Chelsea managed. But the best photographs here remind you that the myth was earned, that it grew from something real and irreproducible, and that the building at 222 West 23rd Street was, for a period, genuinely unlike anywhere else on earth.