Meet Me at the Chelsea
Of the great artistic hubs, New York City holds the reputation for hosting fringe creatives with the power to redirect culture. Beatniks, hippies, punks, and freaks have descended onto the city for decades, and there to welcome them was the Hotel Chelsea.
Linda Troeller, New York, 1997
This hub of bohemian life opened its doors in 1884 in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, and soon artists took up residence within its walls. Its pains and blessings came to inspire authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Jack Kerouac. Playwright Arthur Miller described it as “some kind of fictional place”, a liminal space where nothing quite felt real, where life paused or sped up. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died at the hotel while engulfed in poetry. Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls as a not-quite documentary of the hotel’s residents. Soon, Warhol's actress and muse Edie Sedgwick came to stay as well. Musicians came to see the hotel as its own muse, as in Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” or Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2”. It is its own major character in Patti Smith’s acclaimed memoir Just Kids, where she and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe lived in room 204 by way of art and $55 USD a week. “Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums,” she recounts.
Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith in Room 204, 1970
There are quite literally too many residents to name here. Most of the hotel’s well-known inhabitants lived there in the 1960s and 70s, but its impact continued well into the 21st century. Actor and writer Ethan Hawke returned to the Chelsea following his divorce from Uma Thurman in 2004. It continued to accept residents and guests alike up until 2011 when it closed for renovations. Some stayed in the interim and are the subject of the documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. During an eleven-year closure, property developers and hoteliers tried to evict these residents, luckily to no avail. With its reopening in 2022, about 50 bohemians remain, according to the New York Post. The closing and renovations, however, marked an end to the days of wandering creatives in labyrinthine halls. Now advertised as a luxury hotel, a night at the Chelsea can run you upward of $600 USD. Patti Smith’s $55 a week, even when adjusted for inflation, wouldn’t even get to $100 per night. It is another effect of New York’s gentrification problem. It caters more to tourist clientele rather than the community that built it. The starving artist would have to wither away if they wanted to live there. It was a hub of collaborations, a place where like minds made art for art’s sake, and this turn towards luxury means that tradition will only be accessible to the already established. The drive for artistic expression still lives on, such as the parties of resident Tony Notarberardino. Here, queer artists interplay through shows, creating something entirely new. “The audience needs me and I need the audience,” Veronica Viper, a performer and party-goer, said for Document, “and there’s something symbiotic that happens there in that moment.” And even in the lobby, as you look all about the renovated opulence, visitors collaborate. People come to tap into that nexus of art, if only for an afternoon. You realize that, although it has changed, the Chelsea still belongs to the artists.
Photo by Natalia Neuhaus for Document, 2023
