Design Practice: OUGD405: Reseach Brief: Hotel Chelsea, New York

Every room has a story, most of them memorable and few of them printable. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in 205, playwright Arthur Miller got over his break-up with Marilyn Monroe in 614 and Bob Dylan stayed up for days in 211 ‘writin’ Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’.

Sid Vicious claimed he couldn’t remember stabbing his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in 100. But singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen never forgot what he got up to with Janis Joplin in 415. In fact, none of us will, because he wrote a song about it called Chelsea Hotel #2 (and later regretted his indiscretion).

Surely no other single building can lay claim to so much creativity, destruction and sheer scandal as the Chelsea Hotel in New York. For decades it was a byword for Bohemian eccentricity and hellraising excess, an imposing but squalid sanctuary for writers and artists too penniless or troublesome to live anywhere else.

Jack Kerouac wrote his Beat Generation bible On The Road there, in one drug-fuelled, three-week marathon. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there, too, training his telescope not into space but at the apartment windows opposite.

And composer George Kleinsinger kept a tank of piranhas by his piano so he could dip his fingers into the water to bring him to his senses whenever he felt drowsy.

From writers such as Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, through the hippies and on to the nihilist punks of the 1970s and beyond, ‘the Chelsea’ has more than lived up to its understated description of itself as a ‘rest stop for rare individuals’.

According to Arthur Miller, you could get high just by standing in one of the hotel lifts and inhaling the marijuana fumes.

Now, however, the hotel faces what its residents and fans fear is its final curtain. A property developer recently bought the down-at-heel building for $80 million (£48 million) and has turned it over to an architect best known for designing bland Holiday Inns.

It wasn’t always like that. The Chelsea was built in 1884 by Philip Hubert, an Anglo-French immigrant, as a socialist experiment in which rich and poor would live in the same building. As a foretaste of its later eccentricity, Hubert stuck a pyramid on the roof.

But the 12-storey building hit hard times in 1905 and was reinvented as a hotel. From the start, it attracted writers, artists and musicians, including Lillie Langtry, Frida Kahlo, Mark Rothko and Edith Piaf.

According to Chelsea Hotel historian Sherill Tippins, it was Dylan Thomas who was later responsible for the hotel’s Bohemian reputation.

The arty crowd didn’t always have the place entirely to themselves — survivors from the Titanic were put up there briefly in 1912, and some of the rooms were given to visiting young British merchant seamen in recognition of their countrymen’s service in the First World War I.

The hard-drinking Welsh poet lived there for the last months of his life, competing in alcohol consumption with the Irish poet Brendan Behan (who became so notorious for chasing the Chelsea’s chambermaids that none would enter his room until he was fully dressed).

In 1953, a few months before Thomas collapsed in his room and later died after claiming to have drunk 18 whiskies at a local bar, the Beat poet Jack Kerouac and writer Gore Vidal pitched up at the hotel hoping to find him.

Thomas was away, but the pair — both bisexual — got horrendously drunk and spent a night of passion at the hotel together.

The general anarchy was presided over by the hotel’s famously indulgent manager, Stanley Bard, whose family bought it in the 1930s and who ran the place for 50 years from 1957.

Arthur Miller — who lived in the hotel for seven years from 1960 — recalled alerting Bard to a ‘young woman with eyes so crazy that one remembered them as being one above another’ who would come into the hotel lobby and threaten violence against men.

Mr Bard ‘pooh-poohed the idea of her doing anything rash . . . he was simply not interested in bad news of any kind,’ Miller wrote. Two days later, the woman — a radical feminist named Valerie Solanas — shot Andy Warhol, though he survived.

Above: The song 'Hotel Chelsea no.2' written by Leonard Cohen about his experience when meeting Janis Joplin in the Chelsea Hotel

Interesting Facts:

1. It was one of New York's first private apartment cooperatives.

2. Charles R. Jackson - author of 'The Lost Weekend' committed suicide there on 21.9.1968

3. Residents include: Eddie Izzard, Jonak Mekas and Edie Sedgewick

4. Musicians who lived here include: Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
5. La Roux shot her second version of 'In For the Kill' at the Chelsea.
6. Painter Alphaeus Philemon Cole lived there for 35years until he died at 112 in 1988.
7. Madonna lived there in the early 80s and later returned for a photoshoot
8. Warhol Superstars starring Edie Sedgewick was film here
9. Chelsea Walls was also set here in 2001

Bodoni Bedlam - Alphabet popup book

BBC documentary on te Chelsea Hotel

infogr.am

Patti Smith Blog