Living in the Chelsea Hotel

The landmark Chelsea Hotel was built in the 1880s as one of the city's first private co-ops. In 1905, it re-opened as a hotel. Over the years, the hotel has been the home of numerous writers, musicians, artists, and actors, including Dee Dee Ramone, Bob Dylan, Virgil Thomson, Sam Shepard, Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Miller, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith.

In the 1970s, a New York landmark himself, Stanley Bard took over the management of the hotel, and his son David joined him later on. In the autumn of 1978, punk rocker Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in Room 100, a room that has joined the other ghosts that make up the Chelsea.

View from the Balcony, Room 325

The year is 1995 or 1996. I enter the Chelsea Hotel, push through the heavy glass doors. The light in the lobby adjusts to my eyes. Art runs floor to ceiling around the room. Obscure paintings. Little known artists. A swath of contemporary styles. The room feels different from other rooms. It feels powerful. More powerful than its modest size. Distant thunder rolls through the clear twilight sky.

People linger around the front desk - a diorama pulled through a wormhole from a distant past. A New York thing. A painting of a horse’s head dominates the room. A white horse. Bathed in light. Goes well with the distant thunder.

The Front Desk and Lobby

Art in the Lobby

The art does not stop in the lobby. It runs the walls of the stairwell, the hallways along each of the ten floors. A remarkable collection of works that settles into the architecture as if each piece is a part of the original design.

Art in the Stairwell and Hallways

I can’t sleep. I wander these stairs and halls. The sounds of my own soft steps slip into the silence around me. I stop, take in a face, an expression, a brush stroke. Forget what floor I am on. I somehow make it back to my room, leave my clothes by the door. Step naked onto the balcony into the freezing cold darkness blown open by the orange and white neon that spills against my skin. I turn, go back inside, into the warmth, into the nothingness of sleep.

 

Room 325 

 

Keys to Room 325 

Moving into the hotel is not easy. Before given a lease, a one month trial period is required. Prospective tenants are vetted by Stanley Bard. What criteria he uses, I have no idea. After the month is up, a room on the third floor is offered, a key, Room 325, with a balcony onto 23rd Street.

 

Doors to the Balcony 

23rd street. Between 7th and 8th Avenues. A YMCA. A Chinese laundry that picks up, delivers, its shop windows covered in dated signage that displays hours and services. A mom and pop diner/donut shop with a delightful egg, bacon, and cheese sandwich. A bodega that offers sandwiches, salads, roasted turkey, baked ham, bagels, sausages, chicken parmesan, Entenmann's for dessert. A pizza place, of course. Large slices. Wooden stools. A small bar that caters mainly to gay clientele, people from the neighborhood. El Quijote, a timeless Spanish restaurant on the first floor of the hotel that serves oceans of seafood, caters to a certain "family" crowd from the outer boroughs.

 

A Fixture on 23rd Street 

Dee Dee Ramone hangs out at the front desk. Youthful Rufus Wainwright gives a friendly smile in the elevator. Ethan Hawke makes a film. The third floor hallway bustles with cast and crew for a few days before it is returned to the residents and guests. That is how it is at the Chelsea. 

A woman stands in the lobby. She fears being in close proximity to other people. A tough affliction, I imagine, as a resident of New York City. Her quest to get from the front door to the stairs at the back of the lobby is one fraught with obstacles. Sometimes for amusement (a little mean-spirited perhaps) someone will step in her direction to watch her recoil. She does. She always does. But she always makes it. I like her. She fights.

One day, I say hello to a woman I pass on the stairs. This sets her off. She goes into an uncontrollable rant strung with profanities. Colorful. Loud. It continues until I am well out of range. I come to discover that she does this to everyone. I don't see her often, but when I do I make sure to keep my words to myself. That's the way it is. 

I spend 5 years at the Chelsea before my move to Japan. It's an experience that is difficult to capture, to convey how the rooms feel, what it is like to be surrounded by art and the people who live and pass through here. How it becomes a world of its own in the middle of New York City. But it’s in here, inside of me. I carry it with me wherever I go.

Protest Banner

Of course, the Chelsea Hotel I speak of is no more. Stanley Bard is ousted in 2007. So is David. Pushed out by the new corporate owners. The residents try to get the Bards back. They hang banners. To no avail. I live in Tokyo at the time, but I feel it when I visit New York, find that the hotel is closed to guests. The lobby walls bare. The hotel remains closed to guests even now, in 2017, under renovation, amid legal tangles, scheduled to reopen sometime as who knows what.

So the art is gone. The YMCA is gone. The mom and pop diner/donut shop is gone. The memories remain, but when I walk through the front door now, there is no rumble of distant thunder. The lobby is like any other. My attraction to the neighborhood wanes, too. Still, the sight of the hotel facade and the fact that El Quijote remains unchanged, these things keep me in the moment.

That’s how it is in New York. Signature storefronts and new arrivals replace local shops and long time residents. A reminder that everything lives and everything dies. We mourn and we move on, look for other things that charge us, influence where we go, what we do. I am but an audience for a short time in this grand palace of performance and visual art, but I, too, disappear.

Although I live at the Chelsea Hotel for only 5 years, a great deal of my thoughts and ideas remain tied to the place, and my memories are forever flavored by my experiences there. My novel Clifford and Claudia is written mostly at the Chelsea, in Room 325. The Chelsea also makes an appearance in my first novel, Syncopated Rhythm, as the springboard to my move to Tokyo. Where the distant thunder continues to roll through the clear twilight sky. 

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