CHELSEA HOTEL #2

The Hotel Chelsea is one of those interesting thought experiments about “the good old days” in New York City—about wishing you’d been there back then, back when it was all happening, back before the Starbucks and pilates studios camped out on every corner. On the surface, the history of the hotel reads like a pop culture fairytale that stretches from Mark Twain to Madonna and includes an incredible track record of artistic achievement. Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can’t Go Home Again at the Chelsea. Jack Kerouac wrote parts of On the Road there. Warhol filmed there, while Arthur C. Clarke worked on the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

During its heyday the Chelsea wasn’t exactly a bastion of first-class accommodation. Some rooms, like the one Leonard Cohen rented during his fling with Janis Joplin–immortalized in the song “Chelsea Hotel #2”–were shabby and dated even by 1968 standards. None of that mattered, though. In his essay “The Chelsea Affect,” Arthur Miller lovingly called the hotel a “house of infinite toleration” where the maids rarely ran their vacuum cleaners. Certain luxuries were happily exchanged for action and intrigue and the promise of unpredictability. Residents were free to create DIY wonderlands, the way future New York artists would do with Soho lofts in the ‘80s or Williamsburg warehouses in the ‘00s, all fueled by cheap rents and boundless creativity.

It’s easy to be nostalgic for those eras, but do we really want to go back? Or do we just want to be tourists to the good times? Because while the Chelsea is where Bob Dylan stayed up for days to write “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” where Miller resurrected Marilyn Monroe for his play After the Fall, and where Patti Smith came of age with Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s also the place where Dee Dee Ramone lured heroin addicts like a magnet, where Dylan Thomas spent his last torturous days, and where Nancy Spungeon bled to death from a stab wound to the stomach. Do we really want to go back?

These are the questions the new Hotel Chelsea asks. The property has been irrevocably changed, reinvented by hoteliers Sean MacPherson, Ira Drukier, and Richard Born as the kind of impossibly cool luxury-boutique hotel in which they specialize (see also: the Bowery, Ludlow, and Marlton hotels). This outcome was not without controversy. Plenty of folks wanted the hotel to remain as it was, accessible to a new generation of artists. That’s a noble goal even we could get behind—though it’s not clear it was ever in the cards. New York in the 21st century is different, and even the same old places aren’t the same.

Today’s Chelsea takes inspiration less from mid-century bohemia and more from its 1884 founding as one of the city’s first residential co-ops, back when cooperative housing evoked an egalitarian ideal, not an authoritarian board. The new owners have recaptured the utopian grandeur of the original building: the best of the 155 rooms have fireplaces, stained-glass windows, full kitchens, and one of the famous wrought iron balconies that wrap around the red brick facade.

Pop mythology hasn’t been totally disregarded. The lobby, less chaotic than it once was, is still a mélange of modern and abstract artworks, gifts from guests and tenants who paid with paintings when cash was short. That carries through upstairs, where you won’t find William Burroughs mumbling down the hallways or Allen Ginsberg holding court, but you will find rooms bedecked with art from the hotel’s endless collection. El Quijote—the raucous bar synonymous with the Chelsea—has also been revived. On the wall, a photograph of Burroughs and Warhol dining together there.

Something else upstairs hasn’t changed. Certain long-term tenants remain, living independent of the hotel, their rent-stabilized apartments displaying the evidence of decades of well-lived life. Many turned down a handsome sum to stay in the building they’ve long made home. May we all have such fortitude.

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