Hotel Chelsea Quotes

“Wikipedia: Hotel Chelsea”

“(November 27, 2022), "Inside NYC's famed Chelsea Hotel", CBS Sunday Morning, YouTube”

“(November 5, 2019), "Inside One of the Last Bohemian Homes at the Chelsea Hotel", New York Magazine, YouTube (Interior Lives with Wendy Goodman)”

“Built in 1883 as one of the first cooperative buildings in New York City and briefly among its tallest buildings, the Chelsea was under the ownership of David Bard, Joseph Gross, and Julius Krauss from 1942 and was managed by Bard. Combining both residences and hotel rooms,it was already a storied have for artists and writers by the time David Bard left the day-to-day management to his son Stanley in the early 1960s.
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“It is true that Arthur Miller lived at the Chelsea, and Mark Twain. Janis Joplin did in fact "service" Leonard Cohen there on an unmade bed. It's true that the acting legend Sarah Bernhardt, in her penthouse apartment at the Chelsea, slept nights in her custom-made coffin beneath her custom-made pyramid. On the tenth floor, Stanley Kubrick did argue with Arthur C. Clarke over the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The list of Chelsea luminaries goes on and on. Writers Thomas Wolfe, Nelson Algren, Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, Jean Baudrillard, and others just as famous, wrote books there.”

“For the past decade, the residence hotel on West 23rd Street, a New York character unto itself, has been suspended in a dreary state of endless construction, with a rotating cast of developers struggling to spin this oddity into an upscale boutique hotel.
Even as the pandemic decimates the city’s economy, closing scores of hotels, restaurants and stores, and leaving tens of thousands of New Yorkers unable to pay their rent, the 12-story Chelsea continues to exist in a world unto itself, one that seems to host a seemingly endless cage match where the building’s roughly 50 remaining tenants spar with one another or with the landlord who, in turn, battles with the city. ...
The latest plot twist came in January, when the city dropped a lengthy investigation of tenant harassment that had halted construction for two and a half years. With that obstacle removed, the Chelsea’s owners, Ira Drukier, Richard Born and Sean MacPherson, known for their trendy boutique hotels like the Ludlow, the Maritime and the Bowery, resumed work. They plan to open the Chelsea to guests by the end of the year.”

“... At the hotel on Twenty-third Street, famously rundown and louche—the Last Bohemia for the Final Beatniks, our own Chateau Marmont, where Dylan Thomas drank and Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and Leonard Cohen wore (or didn’t; people argue) his famous blue raincoat, and Sid Vicious killed (or didn’t; they argue that, too) Nancy Spungen—the renovators and gentrifiers have arrived. ...
But, unusually, in this case the new owners have a sense of what they own, and of its past, and so the Chelsea Hotel’s passage is being celebrated rather than hushed up: this week, a group of young players is reviving the play “Cowboy Mouth,” by Patti Smith and Sam Shephard, which tells the story of their love affair in the hotel, with the play put on by a group called Young Artists at The Chelsea right there in the building itself. Even more unusually, the senior citizens of the place are mostly safe. Owing to some decent social activism within the hotel’s community, the long-time residents have been allowed to stay on past the reopening—paying the rents they paid, and remaining the institutional memory of an eccentric but essential institution.”

“Stanley Bard, a Robin Hood of innkeepers who nurtured talented writers and artists and tolerated assorted deadbeats as the manager and part-owner of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan for more than 40 years, died on Tuesday in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 82. ...
While Mr. Bard presided over it, the Chelsea was also home to Viva, the Andy Warhol film star; the artists Larry Rivers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Christo wrapped Jeanne-Claude, his wife, there); the singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen (who wrote a song about it, “Chelsea Hotel #2”); and the punk rock musician Dee Dee Ramone (who caricatured Mr. Bard in a horror novel he wrote).
The Chelsea was where Jack Kerouac worked on “On the Road,” where Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where William Burroughs wrote “Naked Lunch” and where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
Mr. Bard lent long-term tenants money and tolerated their overdue bills; he embraced their eccentricities and encouraged their cultural ambitions.”