Strange bedfellows

I’ve only visited the Chelsea Hotel once, and this was because my wife and I accidentally stum-bled upon it. Walking up (or down) West 23rd Street in Lower Manhattan, there it was, we immediately realized: the place where the famous and infamous have shared floor space since the early 20th century. Site of a rock star girlfriend’s grisly murder, scene of much literary scribbling, art creation, drug abuse and musing over New York’s unique brand of squalor.

We hung out in the lobby and took some pictures, as so many tourists do, but never thought about actually booking a room there. That’s maybe because the place does seem, well, kind of downtown. And this is probably part of the reason so many bohemian types – actors, writers, rock stars, poets and musicians – have made the Chelsea their roosting place for so long: it still has a forbidding seediness to it, a patina of anonymity, despite its tell-tale marquee and gilt-edged sign out front.

After soaking up, for want of a better word, the "atmosphere" of the Chelsea lobby, my wife and I continued toddling down (or up) West 23rd Street, stopping next, I think, at a 99-Cent Store along the way.

Anyway, the hotel now has its own blog site that is chock-full of lore, interviews, links to literary sites, YouTube tidbits, and every possible thing you’d want to know about the Hotel Chelsea while you’re blog slumming. Type in "hotelchelseablog.com" and you’ll arrive at "Living with Legends: The Hotel Chelsea Blog" (subtitled "The Last Outpost of Bohemia").

I don’t usually visit blog sites – I tend to sidestep them the way I would a Lower Manhattan sidewalk wino – but I find myself interested in the way people interact with famous landmarks. Usually, we tourists resort to the horizontal composition: the digital photo capturing our glorious vertical presence standing in front of the landmark in question, something we can show others to prove we intersected with the famous. But it’s how we relate to, receive, and try to live out, in a sense, the landmark’s history that intrigues me. We seem to like dancing with the ghosts.

There’s, in fact, a subsite devoted to the Chelsea’s ectoplasmic occupants. "Ghosts" logs guest encounters with long-term residents who happen to be dead – if you believe in that sort of thing. There’s Larry the Ghost, a talkative spirit whom many guests have reported seeing and hearing down the Chelsea halls. More imaginative sorts, perhaps trying to kick-start a muse, have devised supernatural meetings between real-life literary greats (like Thomas Wolfe, who wrote You Can’t Go Home Again while staying in Room 829; or Bob Dylan and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who have stayed there at various times).

Of course, the hotel’s many famous guests have provided enough history and chismis to last an eternity. It’s the place where Janis Joplin famously fellated Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen on a hotel bed, if you believe the song Chelsea Hotel #2. It’s where Warhol filmed The Chelsea Girls in various rooms, then wove the pointless, tacky – yet fascinating – vignettes into random patterns for his three-hour opus. Of course, Joni Mitchell sang about Chelsea Morning, though she always seemed a little removed from such squalor (Bill and Hillary named their daughter after the song). And it’s the place where Stanley Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke bunkered down to write the screenplay and novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Talk about strange bedfellows.

Other famous names associated with the Chelsea provide a mind-boggling "who’s who" list from the counterculture and underground: from Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs (there’s a cool YouTube video on the site of Burroughs reciting his blistering "Thanksgiving Prayer" from 1985) to playwright Sam Shepard and punk queen Patti Smith (who dated in the early ’70s and wrote plays together there); regal names like Mark Twain, Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) and Poet Laureate Derek Walcott mingle with shabby-chic punk Dee Dee Ramone and barfly Charles Bukowski. From Vladimir Nabokov to Ethan Hawke (who filmed an indie movie about the place), the Chelsea is a place of sub-history, and – even more surprisingly – a place where a good deal of solid work has been accomplished.

The Chelsea also figures in many films: it’s the place where grizzled assassin Leon (Jean Reno) shacked up with an underage Natalie Portman in Luc Besson’s The Professional; Hawke’s Chelsea Walls was set there, as was a scene or two from the Sean Penn-Nicole Kidman flick The Interpreter. Of course, it’s most infamous for its depiction in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy (1986), a fictionalized account of the last days of ex-Sex Pistol Sid Vicious who murdered groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen there. Nobody at the Chelsea likes to talk about that episode much, understandably. SPIN writer Chuck Klosterman chronicled his visit there in Killing Yourself to Live, in which his curiosity rankled a concierge: "There is no Room 100," the guy says in irritation. "They converted it into an apartment 18 years ago." The concierge despises rock "cultists" who visit the Chelsea to eyeball the room where a stabbing took place.

It can’t be denied, though, that music has a long pulse threading through Chelsea history. Bob Dylan’s Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat and Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands (both from 1966) seem steeped in the place; Morrissey’s Twenty-Third Street locates itself there; the Jefferson Airplane sang about their Third Week in the Chelsea; punk/junkie Jim Carroll wrote Crow after his residence; and Ryan Adams gave the world Hotel Chelsea Nights.

Artists as diverse as Robert Mapplethorpe, Yves Klein, Larry Rivers and Robert Crumb have drawn inspiration from its paint-peeling walls. Most intriguingly, artists-in-residence over the decades have donated specimens of their work to the hotel (perhaps to pay the rent?) and some of this work is visible in the lobby.

For those who want to breathe in a little bit of New York City history (without actually breathing in New York City air), hotelchelseablog.com is a relatively safe walk on the wild side. Like most blogs, it’s impressionistic and self-indulgent (if you just want facts, you can visit Wikipedia). The blog appeals to the New York tourist in us all, especially that tourism strain that focuses on the grimmer realities of the Big Apple. Only an oddball assignment would spit you out of New York’s subway system near the Hotel Chelsea anyway, so enjoying its star quality is a must for any parachute voyeur.

And, too, there’s something kind of touching about the allegiance felt by people for this hotel, built in 1883 at a time when the area was a thriving theater district. It was actually the tallest structure in NYC up until 1902. Survivors of the ill-fated Titanic disaster were ferried to the hotel, since it’s so close to the harbor. Again, it’s the many tidbits of history that make Hotel Chelsea – and this blog site – such a kick. Today’s visitors are reveling in that past, blogging up a storm to keep the ghosts alive and kicking.