On An Unmade Bed: The Chelsea Hotel
On An Unmade Bed: The Chelsea Hotel
Writer: Frankih Kolbegger
Site: www.hotelchelsea.com
It’s about 6:00 AM on July 28th, 2007, when I roll into Port Authority on the Greyhound from Albany. The city sky is kind-of grey, and I’m exhausted. I was fortunate enough to see a show the day before – Jesse Lacey and Kevin Devine, solo and acoustic in a tiny venue – and I haven’t slept more than four hours in a couple days. All the sleeping I have been doing has been done on buses, watching the city lights blur as the night turns into morning.
I look around to try and orient myself. The attempt doesn’t really help. I do the sensible thing to do, when it’s so early. I go for coffee. When the time seems more reasonable, after wandering around for a couple hours, I start off to my destination again.
I follow the numbers to 23rd Street, just between 7th and 8th Avenue. A neon sign flickers at me, introducing me to my home for the next two nights: The Hotel Chelsea, also known as The Chelsea Hotel. Walking into the lobby, it’s easy to tell that this place is humming with history.
Opened in 1884 as an apartment building, the place was changed into a hotel in 1905, though the option remains to rent a room for the long term, and really, who wouldn’t want to? Though the rooms are small, the place is alive, and within minutes of settling in a chair in the lobby, I have already met some interesting figures. (Over the course of three days, I will meet a lady who just comes to sit in the lobby and dresses like it’s 1992, an art gallery owner from Montreal, and a very drunken Australian.)
I fall asleep curled up in a chair in the lobby, and when I wake up, it’s eleven in the morning. I approach the check-in desk. My room is ready.
The walls are an odd shade of yellow, and there’s no view from the windows – except for the view into the apartment building next door, or the white plastic chairs on the balconies. The hotel isn’t anything exceptional – except when you consider its history.
The people who have stayed in or lived at the hotel are varied and many, and the hotel could tell a lot of stories if it wanted to. Jack Kerouac wrote his most famous book, On the Road, in one of the hotel’s rooms. William S. Burroughs lived there, as did Charles Bukowski and Mark Twain.
It’s seen actors and artists, including Andy Warhol’s superstar Edie Sedgewick, who lived there just before her consignment to a mental hospital in 1967. She had her breakdown there too; she fell apart after finding out Bob Dylan, with whom she had a close relationship, had been secretly married. Her relationship with Dylan was allegedly not sexual, though more recently, there are claims she terminated a pregnancy, and the child was his.
Musicians have been included in the long list of residents, too; Janis Joplin had a brief affair with Leonard Cohen in the hotel, and they both lived there. One of the more famous references to Hotel Chelsea is actually Cohen’s song, “Chelsea Hotel #2″. (Kudos if you got the song reference in the title. For the record, the unmade beds are very comfortable.)
More recently, Pete Doherty of The Libertines, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and alt-country singer Ryan Adams have all spent significant amounts of time at the hotel. It’s also been immortalized, as well as many of its former inhabitants, in the profound lyrics of the song “Godspeed”, by the alternative band Anberlin, off their 2006 acclaimed album, Cities.
Perhaps the most famous thing to ever take place at the Chelsea Hotel was the death of Nancy Spungen on October 12, 1978. It was ruled a murder, and while many believe her boyfriend, former Sex Pistol, Sid Vicious, was at fault, it could also have been two of the drug dealers who visited. Spungen and Vicious lived in the hotel after the break-up of the Sex Pistols. Parts of the film detailing their lives, <i>Sid & Nancy</i> (made in 1986 by Alex Cox), were filmed in the hotel.
For decades, the Hotel Chelsea has been a safe-haven and home for artists, musicians, actors, and writers. But what’s its allure? Is it the location, a block away from the subway? Maybe it’s the neighbourhood. In modern times, it’s safe to say that part of its allure is definitely its vast history. After all, who doesn’t want to be the next addition to the long list of residents?
At The Hotel Chelsea, the staff are friendly, the beds are comfortable, and the legacy won’t stop growing.
