On a muggy afternoon last week, Chicago painter Susan Olmetti crouched on a sidewalk along West 23rd Street and applied some swirls to a pop art canvas she'd propped up against a long-shuttered storefront. A handful of completed pieces stood drying in the summer haze. Olmetti has spent the last couple of months on this stretch of sidewalk just west of Seventh Avenue, using it as a handy combination of studio and salesroom. "It's euphoric," she explained. "Being in the street, with people."
Nobody takes much notice of such things in this part of town, for a few feet to the right of Olmetti lay the entrance to her temporary home: the Hotel Chelsea, the dotty dowager that has housed thousands of artists since the middle of the last century.
Popularly known as the Chelsea Hotel, it's where Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall, where Arthur C. Clarke wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Bob Dylan penned Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and married Sara Lownds, where Leonard Cohen had a tasty encounter with Janis Joplin that spurred him to write about something happening to him on an unmade bed; he remembered it well.
Aaron Copland, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, and countless others stayed here. (Much life, and some death, too: Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning here; Sid Vicious's girlfriend Nancy Spungen came to a violent end in Room 100, later renamed Room 103; Andy Warhol survived a shooting by Valerie Solanas in the lobby.) Of 250 rooms spread across 12 floors, about 60 per cent are rented out to long-term residents; the rest are by the night at rates that begin around $120 (U.S.) and rise quickly. Its current motto is "a rest stop for rare individuals."
Many of those rare individuals are scared, though, that the hotel's quirky, artist-friendly nature may now be in danger. In June, Stanley Bard, the general manager who has overseen the Chelsea for more than 50 years, was removed as part of a long-running legal dispute between himself and other members of the hotel's board. Bard had been the one who interviewed prospective long-term renters. (Contrary to the myth of cheap rent at the Chelsea, nowadays a small furnished space with little room for possessions could easily run you $2,500 or more a month.) A canny curator of humans, Bard created a rotating series of unusual families and never stopped promoting the work of his artistic residents.
He's been replaced by the slick operators at BD Hotels.
The Manhattan company owns 15 high-end properties, including the trendy Chambers, Mercer, and Maritime hotels. In a press release, the Chelsea's board promised BD would undertake some modernization projects (plumbing, wiring, mechanical, etc.) while "ensuring that the hotel's historic charm and character is both preserved and enhanced." But any change is enough to worry the Chelsea denizens.
In an essay entitled The Chelsea Affect published in the Summer 2002 edition of Granta, Arthur Miller recalled that, "it was a general rule that when something weird happened, nobody - not Stanley, not the desk man or the phone operator or [the building engineer]- would ever really know quite what it was all about, and so a kind of fog of exhausted enquiry suffused the place."
Nothing's changed. Now that Stanley and his son David have been removed (though not even removed, exactly: they still live on the premises, and still chat daily with the residents during morning rounds in the lobby), nobody seems to know who's in charge or what changes are in store. Newspaper reports have carried juicy stories about one or two of the board members receiving mob-like threats (packages containing the head of a fish; a bag of manure). One resident's blog breathlessly reports every real and perceived slight by new management.
The overwhelming sense is that the board may have legal power over the hotel, but it's the residents who really control the place through a higher moral authority. They have rallied the world's press (a German reporter prowled the lobby last week; the Germans love the Chelsea) and procured support from some of its more famous alumni including Christo and Jeanne-Claude; Ethan Hawke, who lived there and also made Chelsea Walls on location, there, stopped by for a chat with new management.
Amid the sense of impending doom, some of its current residents are trying to remind the world why the Chelsea is unique. Writer Ed Hamilton (the breathless blogger) will publish a history of the place in October under the title Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca. (One chapter is a ghost story about a séance he participated in with writer Susan Swan, in Room 831, where Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again.)
Photographer Linda Troeller, who has lived at the hotel on and off since 1994, is coming out with a book of pictures and reminiscences by a broad swath of residents past and present titled Atmosphere: An Artist's Memoir of the Chelsea Hotel, NYC.
When I dropped by to see Troeller in her room last week, she was playing a CD of jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin on her compact stereo system. (Most everything in Troeller's 150-square-foot room is compact, except for her own photographs on the walls, which are large and radiant. She has a small flat-screen TV attached to one wall, just above a bar fridge.)
Troeller mentioned that Benjamin, who is a hotel resident, had been at a party she'd thrown the other night in her room. (A tray of clean champagne flutes stood on a tray atop her desk, anticipating the next soirée.) There are frequent parties in the rooms: book launches, art shows, salons. "I wonder if there are so many things going on here that I hardly have time to go to other things," she admitted. "With the people I know in the building, I have a full cultural experience."
It's true, she acknowledged, that the hotel no longer carries the same cachet it once did in the worlds of art and literature; the power centres of those worlds are now so diffused. "But this is one human piece of the culture scene that still provides the dream of connection. If I couldn't be here, I would hope to go to MacDowell Colony," she said.
In Troeller's book, pianist Bruce Levingston is quoted as saying of the Chelsea: "It is the only residence I know where your neighbours leave you notes saying they 'loved the Chopin you were playing around two in the morning' and mean it."
Troeller also quotes New York Times Magazine writer James Traub, who captures the essential irony of the Chelsea as it now exists. "It's strange, but fitting, that a venue so famously outré is at the same time as venerable as an old duchess," he writes. "Everything familiar in Times Square is long gone, for who can afford the rent in the crossroads of the universe? But the Chelsea, off in its own world, soldiers on behind its stupendous brick and iron battlement, sheltering its eccentric brotherhood."
Simon Houpt