The legendary Chelsea Hotel, New York

"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were talking so brave and so sweet
giving me head on the unmade bed
while the limousines wait in the street
Those were the reasons and that was New York

we were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left…"

The Chelsea Hotel in New York is where Leonard Cohen lived when he wasn't at his home in Montreal. He chose the Chelsea because he hoped to meet people with similar artistic inclinations, which he did. When introd­ucing this 1971 song in concert, he would often tell a story about meeting a famous singer (Janis Joplin) in an elevator of the Chel­sea, which led to the sex he describes in this song.

I know a great deal about Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin and 1960s music, but the Chelsea Hotel was a mystery to me. Enter Sherill Tippins’ book, Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

The Chelsea Hotel was not created in the 1960s, as a centre of counter-culture or any other thing. It was actually built by as a very large block of flats in the Chelsea suburb of Manhattan in 1883! Architect Philip Hubert was already known for his socially aware, co-operative apartments and residential hotels, built at a time when the ordinary working families in NY were having a tough time economically. What I did not know about, before reading the book, was the Social Improvement Theory behind Hubert’s thinking, based on Charles Fourier’s utopian communities.

Chelsea Hotel, New York

The twelve storeys were converted into a hotel in 1905, perfectly located in a centre of the New York art, theatre and music world.

So the question Tippins had to answer was how did this respectable building, with its lovely Victoria cast iron balconies, red bricks, gables and grand staircase, become the largest artists’ community and bohemian hang-out in the USA? It seems that Philip Hubert wanted the hotel to be a utopian haven for communities of artists. So the managers were instructed to set relatively cheap rentals. If music­ians and artists learned to love this home away from home, they would encourage their arty colleagues to live in the Chelsea Hotel as well.

A few generations of artists have been born, created their works and died since 1905. Yet most of the fascination about the re­sidents of the Chelsea Hotel seems to focus on the decades immed­iat­ely foll­ow­ing the end of World War Two. Young, creative and avant garde artists from the 1950s and 1960s experimented with modernity while getting drunk, getting high and getting laid. So I liked the reviewer who wrote “The Chelsea has had its high points and low, supreme artistic achievements and drug-addled suicides, sometimes in the same room”. Absolutely!

There were so many names, but I was most interested in Dylan Thomas, Mary McCarthy, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Gore Vidal and Andy Warhol – these were the names that most influenced my undergraduate years. 

Tippins is to be thanked. “Inside the Dream Palace” is there to remind Baby Boomers that the hotel certainly nurtured and inspired all the arts, as we had hoped. But those very same artists often bitterly disap­p­ointed Baby Boomers, something we tend to forget. What was Dylan Thomas thinking, drinking himself into oblivion in the Chelsea Hotel in 1953, far away from his loved ones at home, and not calling for medical care? Why did the supremely seductive Janis Joplin allow her body to fall apart and die at 27?

Janis Joplin on the Chelsea Hotel roof garden,

June 1970.

Photo credit: Celebrity Gossip Wall

I am not familiar with Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with Artists and Outlaws in New York's Rebel Mecca, by Ed Hamilton 2007, although it is clear that Hamilton’s rugged title is more provocative that Tippins’ dreamy title. Perhaps Tippins located the ambiv­al­ence more clearly. The hotel was to be a fountain of cultural prod­uctivity yet it became a safe home for counter culture. Artists were to support and encourage each other to be their best creative selves, yet they often led their colleagues into appalling, destructive behaviour. The hotel was to inspire tolerance, but during the Vietnam war and other invasions, the artists were specifically targeted by the Establishment as un-American.

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New York Times July 2011 wrote: Saturday night was, by all indications, the last night that the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street would accept guests, though the duration of the closing, its first ever, was unknown. The building is to be sold for $80+ million to a developer. Extensive renovations are expected to take at least a year. The hotel’s 100 permanent residents will be allowed to stay, but they have been told nothing beyond what the startled hotel workers learned late last week: that all reservations after Saturday were cancelled. The developer is said to want to keep the Chelsea as a hotel, but the plans are unclear. The building, a looming Queen Anne that opened as a co-op in 1884, is landmarked. The architect hired to oversee the renovations, said the plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems and the lobby all had to be overhauled, but added that much of the hotel’s original charm, including the wrought-iron interior stairwell and the art, would be preserved.

The building has been a designated New York City landmark since 1966 and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1977. While National Register listings are mostly symbolic, their recognition of significance provides some financial incentive to owners of listed properties. Protection of the historically important property is not guaranteed.

Did the opening of the High Line have an impact on Chelsea. This urban park in the sky, which opened in 2008 and was extended in 2011, exactly bisects the Chelsea Historic District to the east and the Chelsea Piers to the west.