Inside the Most Infamous Hotel in Rock & Roll History - AD Checks In - Architectural Digest

The Hotel Chelsea is a combination of the Plaza Hotel and a Greyhound bus station. It captures the glamour of Hotel Chelsea. It has a history of being a little shady like a Greyhound bus station. Welcome to Hotel Chelsea. When the building was designed in the 1880s, it was designed to be a real sort of co-op, to have people coming and going and cross-pollinating with different types of ideas. When we acquired Hotel Chelsea, it had already been under construction for several years. It was torn apart and it was in far worse shape than even five years prior to that. We also were very careful to try not to rip out the existing crown moldings, existing marble floors, existing historic staircase, and it felt like an archaeological dig where we had to gain information and rework everything without destroying it. We're in the lobby here and there's always a lot of people coming and going. It's one of the things I really like. In this particular room, there's layers of history here, so I don't know if this fireplace was necessarily here in 1884, but it's been here since at least 1920. But the marble floor was existing, the marble wainscoting's existing, all of that is really original. Most of the furniture is new because there really wasn't any furniture left here that was worth salvaging, but the core frame that everything is in is original. And because of the kind of eclectic nature of the guests over the years, it feels like everywhere you look at Chelsea, there's a story and I've learned more and more of the stories over time, and they're all sort of spectacular. For the last 30, 40 years, different people stayed here and some of them traded art for rooms, some of them gave art, some of the art was purchased, but there was an enormous collection of art that had been accumulated over the years from people who had stayed here. I always liked the barter system, I just thought it's incredibly cool, so we've tried to maintain it. We recently had a painter, Oliver Clegg, stay here and we traded paintings for rooms. We're just trying to sort of maintain the spirit of the hotel. We have so many people who help keep the property alive. My name is William Benson, and I am doorman, historian, and tour guide here at the Historic Chelsea Hotel. The first time I came to the Chelsea Hotel, I was 18. It intersected with all of my interests growing up in rural Oklahoma, film, literature, music, everything. So I came here with a degree of expectations and it met every one of them. My recollection is half the doors were open and people freely went in and out of each other's rooms and wanted to know who you were and what you were working on. The hallways themselves were so iconic and the doorway structures that I'd seen in movies, it literally felt like entering another world to come here. Stanley, when he came on as general manager in the 60s, it was the family business and it became his life's mission and ambition to not only maintain the legacy of this place but to build upon it. It has a personality of its own. The creative clientele has a personality that we cater to. It's interesting and the people are beautiful. A question I'm often asked is if there's sort of a quintessential Chelsea character if I had to pick one. Patti Smith and her book Just Kids brings people to me three to one over everything else. I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan and to know that behind a certain door was where he would pen songs that inspired me. Obviously Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin's Infamous Night together. Leonard Cohen would often tell her about his meeting Janis Joplin on the elevator and he had asked her if she was looking for anyone in particular and she said Chris Christopherson and he said today's your lucky day. I'm Chris Christopherson. He said that she responded I thought you would be taller and then they ended up spending the night together and which resulted in the song Chelsea Hotel Number Two that he would go on to write. People like Thomas Wolfe and Arthur Miller, they came here, the statement was they were here to work and a huge part of that is just talking to other artists, sharing your ideas and inspiring each other. The folk movement in which hugely inspired by Harry Smith's compilation to the beats who were looking to the writers before them and then you've got the Warhol universe showing up and to some degree being a driving force around here in their era. On and on it's almost as if some generations beckon in the next. When the hotel closed it was as good as gone. You know there's a bad habit in major cities and in New York in particular where they sanitize our history and what made and makes this city great. For it to be back in any incarnation especially this was a huge surprise and and such a positive one. In particular the Chelsea Hotel where there's nothing like it. It's really been a crossroads for the world in terms of its inspiring of people and its gathering of really in my eyes an estimation very important people who drive the culture in a lot of ways. So to have this history that made people like myself and plenty others who they are and to still have it is I believe of great importance. The hotel seems to have a funny way of sucking you in. It's the closest I get to a sort of a paranormal experience. Well we have some very infamous ghosts as far as ghost stories go. A common question when I give people tours is what rooms and what spaces of the hotel are haunted. I always say this floor is haunted because there's a photo of my ex-girlfriend back there. It's such a dumb joke. It is funny just in the few years of our reopening people tell me that you know they felt someone walk by them in their room or the door mysteriously closed and then inevitably I get asked for my experiences and I'm sad to say that I've been coming here since the previous century and I haven't seen or felt anything but I'm here all the time now it seems like and I go home and I sleep and dream that I'm here so I fear that I'm the extent of my own haunting now. This is one of the most storied hotels in New York City. A hotel that maybe had high-profile wealthy people but these were always kind of high-profile notorious artists etc and some scoundrels and some outlaws a little bit like a Oliver Stone movie. It's hard to distinguish between fact and fiction at what point the stories were embellished or what have you but they all feel very true to me but Bob Dylan most definitely lived in this hotel for a period of time and most definitely wrote music while he was living here and from what I've been told Bob Dylan lived actually in this room and he wrote Sarah in this room. I think probably the most frequently requested room is the Nancy and Sid Vicious room which is you know ultimately quite a sad story. It was during the Sex Pistols era and Nancy was found dead and allegedly he had murdered her here at the hotel. They definitely took her dead body out of the hotel and then he died of a drug overdose before he was tried so it was never proven with certainty precisely what happened. This is a one of our smaller rooms probably Bob Dylan was on a great budget at that point in his life. On top of the building there were seven large north-facing units that have 15 foot ceilings and get incredible northern light and they're what we call the artist lofts and they're they're really kind of special. What happened because people lived here for so long and they were permanent residents maybe someone would be living in one unit and then the neighbor would move out to them and they would just build into the unit next door and to sort of colonize a little space so it's kind of fun to see how the how the rooms just vary from room to room to room but we wanted to really work hard to elevate the hotel and elevate the design and have it feel clean but we wanted to try to avoid it feeling corporate and so the design general intention was kind of rich bohemian that sort of quality so we have these Chinese art deco rugs from the 30s we have these faded velvet curtains which we had made which are sort of supposed to feel like faded blue jeans behind them we have the bullet hole shears which are supposed to sort of communicate some notion of punk rock. Almost every room has a balcony and from what I can see online it feels like almost every famous person who ever checked into this hotel took off all their clothes stood on the balcony naked and took a picture of themselves. Hotel Chelsea has always felt other like it lives in a parallel universe and that kind of always has and I hope that always will and so in working the design I really deliberately tried not to look at any visual reference of a really contemporary or for that matter even historic buildings I just want it to feel like it's just slightly in its own world. El Coyote opened in 1930 and historically it's been the only restaurant in Hotel Chelsea so there's a lot of stories whether it's Patti Smith and Just Kids talking about or photographs of Andy Warhol coming here but this was sort of the watering hole for the entire hotel. We have various historic pieces here we use some historic art and some historic tchotchkes. We took one of the old menus and sort of obscured it behind the current menu just again the sort of layers of history layers upon layers. The partition is original the mural is original and interestingly there was a linoleum floor in here which I peeled up and found this original marble mosaic so the marble mosaic is new to this iteration of El Coyote but it was the original floor. I also tore down the old ceiling and discovered this beautiful ceiling underneath which I left intact it's all sort of crumbling and I really like that quality. The bar is original and the bar has cigarette burns on it probably from Dylan Thomas etc and I like that kind of feeling of one the history but also the time when people actually smoked cigarettes at a bar and let them burn the bar top. These particular lighting fixtures we bought vintage these are actually Mexican by this craftsman named Fedders. I just really like them I like the feeling of them so I collected some for this restaurant. To me it feels pretty close to how it felt the first time when I came here in the 90s and just it just feels like a timeless space it feels like stepping back into some past that maybe you imagined existed but had never been part of. This is the original restaurant that had always been in the hotel but we wanted to have a restaurant that you have breakfast lunch and dinner and wasn't just Spanish food so we opened up Cafe Chelsea in what was formerly a bait and tackle shop. The idea that is just a classic French brasserie that serves around the clock. Being from 1884 there was there were two places for people to go here originally there was the men's dining room and the ladies tea room and the men's dining room was you know sort of torn out at some point but the ladies tea room has always been there and it's got this hand-painted fresco on the ceiling and so we just restored that room and kept it as the ladies tea room. The lobby bar is in a zone behind the front desk that has these beautiful high ceilings and a backyard and a garden and it had been used as storage for the last several decades so we suddenly pulled out all the boxes and dusted it off we have this incredible space and so we built it to be just a grand lobby bar. One thing about this hotel it was built by a French architect it has these incredible volumes and as much as it was run down it always had these great bones of something quite regal and so the idea with the formality and that elegance the crown molding was covered and there was a freeze below that and when we uncovered everything some of it remained and some of it was missing we recast it and replaced it restored it all back to the original. One of the things I really like about our lobby bar is it caters to both hotel guests and locals and I've always really liked the mixing of all this sort of stuff. Speaking of mixing it's got incredibly well mixed drinks all curated by our Director of Bars Brian Evans. This is the 100th universe cheers. Hi I'm Brian Evans and I'm the Director of Bars for Hotel Chelsea. Here we have the lobby bar that is sort of past meets present inspired by a lot of the hotel guests throughout history the cocktails all lean really classic but with kind of a modernist edge to them. These spaces and the cocktail menus and even the food menus hopefully encapsulate a bit of that history you know the lobby bar we name all of our cocktails on the menu in reference to former guests or long-term residents. We have a cocktail called the Two Dylans which actually is a fun whiskey sour with raspberry and curry leaf the name is in reference to Bob Dylan who lived here as well as Dylan Thomas Ryder who lived here for a while. I've always been fascinated with E Sedgwick and how she pretty much lit her room on fire you know she I guess fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand and the room caught fire. Probably my favorite story of the history of this hotel. Most recently we opened Teruko named after Teruko Yokoi an artist who actually lived at the Hotel Chelsea. It's a basement Japanese restaurant that actually holds the largest Japanese whiskey selection in all of North America. We're here on the roof which is now the terrace to the spa and the gym. The Chelsea roof was a garden it was used by a lot of the residents of the hotel. Behind me is the gym which has had a lot of lives it was an infirmary for a period of time it was occupied by the musician Jabriath. There's a documentary BBC made in 1981 it shows great footage of Jabriath performing in his apartment which was just up here on the roof which is fantastic and Warhol walking the halls and shooting the hotel. There's a pyramid at the very top of the pyramid that came from Shirley Clark in the 60s. Hotel Chelsea is a designated landmark. The space is so special we wanted it to be open to the public and just seemed like the most natural thing to do is to put the gym inside of it so people could see it and experience it. We didn't want to be sort of lost to a private room. With this thing of sort of trying to update the hotel but not make it too modern a lot of people would have put a roof bar up here but we wanted just to feel like a very comfortable place. It's been a residential and commercial building forever and just a spa seemed more appropriate. Thanks for stopping by hope to see you soon.