For what has historically been a two-star auberge, the Hotel Chelsea boasts one of the more extensive Wikipedia entries you’ll find, stuffed full with gossip and legend, arcane historiography and painstaking architectural detail. Our appetite for excavating whatever once lay behind the Chelsea’s venetian blinds and iron-filigreed facade remains, somehow, still unsated. The historic ledger of its tenants and frequenters has been so thoroughly plundered that we can now cite it all down to the room number—Bob Dylan (211), Jimi Hendrix (430), Patti Smith cohabitating with Robert Mapplethorpe (1017), and Edie Sedgwick moving into a new room (105) after setting fire to her old one.
Yet somehow the lore never feels completely ran-through. Hotel Chelsea emanates the knowing charm of someone who guards their secrets well, with smirking lips tightly shut. It’s irresistible. We love the Chelsea because it has shown us what can happen in a place where disparate types coalesce and everything is permitted. People have made great art in the Chelsea—Dylan wrote Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands there. People have had torrid affairs in the Chelsea. And people have died in the Chelsea, of loneliness, alcoholism, or by someone else’s hand. On October 12, 1978, Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was arrested on suspicion of the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in their room at the Chelsea (100). ‘They just let anybody in over there’, wrote Andy Warhol in a diary entry that day. ‘That hotel is dangerous, it seems like somebody’s killed there once a week’.
And yet Warhol, too, couldn’t keep away; he had his regular table at El Quijote, the restaurant downstairs. Morbid or not, it’s easy to see why the Hotel Chelsea is such juicy fodder for our curiosity. Of course, some people forget that the Hotel Chelsea is still just a regular hotel, with the full suite of ‘regular hotel’ offerings: a check-in desk, a bar, room keys, concierge service, and 125 reservable rooms ranging from petite to grande. The number of rooms would be higher except for the not-insignificant number of residential tenants who are still living in the Hotel Chelsea on their original leases, completely unevictable.
Downstairs in the El Quijote bar you’ll see, above you, the original tin roof, discovered after the old roof was cleared away during renovations. Below you, the original marble terrazzo, also discovered after the removal of the worn chequerboard floor. Eras and histories have porous borders at the Hotel Chelsea, which is perhaps why we continue to pilgrimage there, why we continue to patronise it, and why, in 2016, after years of litigation and stubborn resistance from the hotel’s tenants, a small group of investors were able to sink $250 million into buying, renovating, and reopening the Hotel Chelsea, formerly the Chelsea Hotel, with somewhat more sophisticated airs. Its gorgeous Queen Anne exterior remains intact while its interior has been reworked, the fringed lampshades steam-cleaned, the Fior di Pesco marble polished, and small-but-previously-unimaginable additions made in the form of a spa and a gym.
Another reason we pilgrimage there—because it is truly the New Yorkest of New York buildings. A few parallels to illustrate the point: It was one of the first buildings in the city to have duplex and penthouse apartments, now synonymous with the aspirational luxury of life in Manhattan. While New York City went bankrupt in 1975, the Chelsea had done so first some thirty years earlier. Much like New York, the hotel has never made any secret of its soft-nodding embrace of the continental mode de vie, featuring for many years a rarefied European floor-numbering system. For the right price guests at the Chelsea can even enjoy the special privilege of a room facing directly onto the back of another building, a charm most of us regular New York inhabitants with limited access to sunlight must be too querulous to properly appreciate.
An Ellis Island of the avant-garde’ is how one journalist described the hotel in 1965. Can we be surprised that, much like Ellis Island, it has become somewhat of a museum? Recently, there was even an auction where you could buy the old HOTEL CHELSEA neon sign that beamed so beguilingly down the length of 23rd Street, and which was recently replaced with an identical replica. The original signage was subdivided into individual letters available for between $5,000 and $10,000 a pop. A room at the Chelsea is, mercifully, much more affordable—and a drink at El Quijote doubly so. The Hotel Chelsea rarely welcomes one-timers; people tend to go back. They pass under the red-brick exterior, take a seat in the lobby bar, bask in the warm glow of the lamplight, and imagine how things used to be. At the Chelsea, you never know if you’re sitting in the same booth as Leonard Cohen once sat in, but the fun of it is that you might be.
Chorizo a la Sidra, Paella de Verduras
El Quijote Restaurant
226 West Twenty-Third Street
New York, N. Y. 10011
United States
*Credits