The Chelsea (Helayne Seidman)
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For as often as the death of the Chelsea has been reported, it has at long last come to pass, officially sold two weeks ago for $85 million to a developer whose worst sin may be his profound lack of cool.
“It’s very confusing, to say the least,” says Stanley Bard, the hotel’s much-beloved former manager and owner of 54 years. “They don’t build buildings like that today.”
It’s true; they don’t. In her best-selling memoir “Just Kids,” Patti Smith, who lived there in the ’70s, compares the Chelsea to “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone,” perhaps the most apt description yet. What made the Chelsea special, as anyone with even a passing interest in bohemia knows, were its legions of artists and writers, rich and poor, famous and obscure, all living in a freely chosen state of democratized decadence.
Mark Twain stayed here. Bob Dylan wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” here. Dylan Thomas collapsed from pneumonia here, dying a few days later. It’s where Jack Kerouac wrote parts of “On the Road” and Arthur C. Clarke “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where Warhol’s superstars installed themselves, where, most famously, Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen.
To the hotel’s lovers and defenders, these people and events should be enough to preserve it as is. Yet they don’t get the irony of an argument that points to the past when advocating for the future.
That said, the gutting of the Chelsea is a devastating loss to downtown New York, which has already mourned the passing of CBGB in 2006 and the Mars Bar this summer. (Of the latter, New York magazine wrote, “Go ahead and drink yourself to death here. That’s what everyone does.”) Both were wildly romantic places to any outcast kid from suburbia with a love of punk and deep need to belong somewhere.
The Chelsea is the final blow. Even though the its exterior will be preserved (the building was landmarked in 1966), that’s just cosmetics and not really the point. It’s the people and ideas who moved through here that made the Chelsea special, and both, it’s been made clear, are no longer welcome. The hotel is now like a coma patient: still there physically, but no action on the inside.
The hotel’s multimillion-dollar sale to a highly commercial and conventional owner is in keeping with a sad truth: The Chelsea’s glamour and relevance evaporated long ago, and there may no longer be a place for it in a landscape increasingly dominated by chains. Sure, there are still some interesting, kind of famous people living there: T magazine editor Sally Singer, formerly of Vogue; art-world scion Lola Schnabel, daughter of Julian; ’80s club queen Suzanne Bartsch. No one really avant-garde or dangerous has lived there in decades unless you maybe count Ethan Hawke, and that depends on what your definition of dangerous is. More than anything, the Chelsea is now reminiscent of the haunted Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” its spectral residents with their fading power just daring the living to move on.
In the two weeks since the sale went through, guests were kicked out and a doorman installed. The doorman doesn’t actually open the door; he’s really just a glorified bouncer. Only the 100 tenants who remain are allowed entry.
“The mood is funereal,” says resident Scott Griffin, 40, who has lived here for 20 years. Today, the halls are as silent as libraries. Every vacant unit has been padlocked from the outside, doors painted with a thin layer of institutional white, the lobby stripped of all its art. This is a war of attrition now, the die-hard residents vs. the new corporate board.
And what better way for the new owners to win than to swiftly snuff out any last vestige of the Chelsea’s soul, which is really all it has left?
Construction on the Hotel Chelsea, as it’s formally known, began in 1883. It became a beacon for artists when composer Virgil Thompson took up residence in the 1930s, bringing with him Aaron Copeland and Leonard Bernstein. Long before the word “branding” became part of the vernacular, the Chelsea’s guests — from Edith Piaf to Iggy Pop, Jane Fonda to Jean-Paul Sartre, Dennis Hopper to Madonna — bestowed upon the hotel an invaluable identity: It was cool, indisputably and incomparably so. And not just anyone could stay there. To take up residence, you had to go through Stanley, who treated the Chelsea like his own personal art project, curating all the right people. It wasn’t quite the open, judgement-free society it’s now lamented as.
Stanley Bard’s late father, David, purchased the hotel with two partners in 1939, and it remained in these families until now. David was the majority owner with an affinity for the artist, and this philosophy — the elevation of art above all, including and especially money — has taken on quite the romantic cast. The rap on Stanley, now 77 and in ill health, is that he was as much a bohemian dreamer as his most celebrated guests, a guy who would routinely take paintings as payment and drove the place into insolvency. In truth, he was rolling them.
“I paid $7,500 a month,” says former resident Sam Barrett, 33, who lived in a tiny, triangle-shaped unit on the hotel’s roof. “I lived among a beautiful English garden with a 35-year-old tree,” he says, and that seemed worth the money.
Under Stanley Bard, resident Artie Nash, 39, says he was paying $3500 a month; the city later informed him that he was being overcharged, and he got it down $1250.
Even Patti Smith says Bard was a shark, charging her and then-boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe so much rent that they “could have had a fair-sized railroad flat in the East Village” instead of a tiny space with a single bed.
So much for bohemian utopia, artists vs. the Man. It’s like in the movies, when the call is coming from inside the house!
Also, the Chelsea really is kind of a dump. This is blasphemy, but it’s true. The hotel hasn’t seen structural upgrades in decades. It feels the way it looks: sagging, weighted down, sad. As recently as 2008, a steampipe explosion destroyed the artist Donald Baechler’s room. The walls need sanding and fresh paint. Some of the windows are cracked. Not all of the art that hangs on the walls is good; some of it is just bad. You can’t get room service; it was never an option. Not all of the rooms have bathrooms. The Chelsea grew old without any upkeep — just like CBGB and the Mars Bar, which were both seriously disgusting by the time they died.
CB’s bathroom, in particular, was legendary for its filth; patrons and performers famously avoided it. People who’d never been in it spoke as if they had. It was a point of pride below 14th Street to have survived it. In 2010, four years after CB’s closed, artist Justin Lowe re-created the bathroom as an art installation for a museum in Connecticut. Rich people paying to see something poor people wouldn’t take a piss in — that’s the epitome of what’s happened to the city, morphing as it is into one giant shopping mall studded with chain restaurants and allegedly hip hotels that won’t rent rooms for less than $400 a night.
The Chelsea’s new owner, Joseph Chetrit, is an unlikely buyer; he’s no Ian Schrager or Andre Balazs, hoteliers who have an affinity for properties that have their own brand of louche, rock ’n’ roll glamour. Balazs, who seamlessly kept the integrity of LA’s famed Chateau Marmont while updating and upgrading it, was interested in buying the Chelsea and was probably the best fit. He was reportedly squeezed out in a rigged bidding war.
“Andre himself told me it was as fair as an African election,” says one longtime resident. David Bard, Stanley’s son, also made an offer in the neighborhood of $80 million, but board member Marlene Krauss, by now running the show and maintaining a decades-long war with the Bards, refused.
Instead, Krauss sold to Chetrit, who has a dubious record of stillborn projects in his wake and absolutely nothing of downtown New York about him: He’s middle-aged, portly, mustachioed, deeply religious. What he wants with a property whose brand is sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll boggles the mind.
In 2004, Chetrit bought the Empire Hotel with the aim of converting it into condos. But the corridors were too narrow and the layout too problematic, and it remains a hotel, with some longtime tenants reportedly living there for free. In 2005, Chetrit bought the famed Toy Building on Madison Square Park with the same aim, but that didn’t work out either, and he sold it in 2007.
“He’s sort of a deal junkie,” says one longtime NYC hotel analyst who has worked with Chetrit several times. “He buys first and asks questions later.”
Chetrit’s been unable to co-opt and create a project with real cachet: The Empire’s appearances on “Gossip Girl” don’t quite cut it.
Even more depressing: Chetrit has hired Gene Kaufman, an architect best known for his work with the Holiday Inn hotel chain, to oversee the Chelsea’s renovation. “That is just bizarre,” says the analyst. “It’s on the other end of the style universe.” That is, if one agrees that Holiday Inns have style.
And so it goes, another beacon for the beautiful and the damned lost to the history. (Can Max Fish really be all that’s left?) The Chelsea was, quite literally, the only concrete reminder of a city that was once uniquely welcoming to young artists, culturally and financially. That, truly, is a romantic notion and why the Chelsea — now a part of Old New York — mattered so much. Even if, in the end, it was mostly just another New York myth.