The Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan Has Been Given a Luxurious Revamp

After an 11-year revamp, The Hotel Chelsea is back. Barry Divola checks in to check out the vibe.

In her award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith wrote lovingly of her time living at The Hotel Chelsea, where she moved in 1969, describing the inhabitants as “guitar bums, stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses, junkie poets, playwrights and broke-down filmmakers”.

I remember the last time I stayed at the Chelsea. It was almost 15 years ago, in what were commonly known as “the bad old days” of New York. I got into my room and heard a distressed voice coming from next door at high volume.

“I don’t need anything grand!” a young woman complained to her companion. “I just want to stay somewhere that doesn’t remind me of my grandmother’s spare room from the ’70s!”

Man, was she in the wrong hotel. My room measured about four square metres, the carpet was a ratty shagpile, there was a chipped chest of drawers supporting a chunky old TV and I was sharing a small bathroom in the hall with half a dozen other rooms on the same floor. Back then, no-one booked into the Chelsea expecting a high-end experience. You stayed here because of the history, the vibe and the incredible roll call of musicians, artists, writers, poets and actors who had created magic in those rooms.

Opened as a co-op apartment building in 1884, its illustrious history as a bohemian hotel began in 1939, when it was purchased by Joseph Gross, Julius Krauss and David Bard. The Chelsea’s downtown Manhattan neighbourhood, with its proliferation of art galleries and open embrace of the LGBTQIA+ community, was a magnet for those seeking an alternative New York. The hotel became both a meeting place and a home for creatives.

In Room 211, for example, Bob Dylan wrote songs for his classic 1966 Blonde On Blonde album and 10 years later, in the song Sara, he name-checked the place with the line “staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writing Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands for you”.

Elsewhere, Leonard Cohen had a liaison with Janis Joplin, whom he met in the elevator, and immortalised the occasion in Chelsea Hotel #2: "I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet.”

Almost every Beat writer checked in at some point during the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Punk pioneer Patti Smith and her partner, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, started out in the smallest room in the hotel and worked their way up from the first-floor digs. Arthur C. Clarke stayed in the mid-’60s and wrote the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls here in the same decade and Madonna shot photographs for her book Sex here in 1992.

And infamously and tragically, on 12 October 1978, Nancy Spungen was found dead in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. “Nearly every day we get a call from someone wanting to know if they can stay in the same room where Sid and Nancy lived,” says William Benton, who works the hotel’s front desk and the door. Well, the answer to that question is now a yes.

After more than a decade largely without guests because of a dispute with some of the hotel’s residents, a revolving door of owners and a renovation some thought would never end, the Chelsea finally opened for business again last year.

When I stayed here in 2008, I met David Bard’s son, Stanley, the hotel’s former long-time manager, who’d been ousted in a takeover the year before. Bard famously ran the hotel on handshake deals, sometimes taking a painting from an up-and-coming artist in lieu of rent – there was a Brett Whiteley hanging in the reception area, as the artist lived in Room 1028 for a couple of years in the late ’60s. Despite still smarting from his firing, Bard called himself an ambassador for the Chelsea and remained upbeat about its future.

“It will always remain,” he told me. “Nothing can change it. Management companies come and go, people come and go, but the heritage of the Chelsea and the walls of the Chelsea and the feeling you get from the Chelsea will be here long after I’m gone.”

Bard died in 2017 at the age of 82 but he was right. The Chelsea lives on. A lot has changed but many of the hotel’s defining characteristics are preserved: the iconic vertical neon sign; the black wrought-iron staircase; the beautiful mosaic floors; the art on the walls from former residents such as Robert Lambert, Brion Gysin and Donald Baechler.

The biggest change is in the renovated guestrooms, which are a vast improvement. The décor is a beguiling mix-and-match of vintage styles, including plush velvet couches and tiger-striped chairs. Rock ‘n’ roll touches abound: artfully distressed curtains; Pollock-like paint-splatter designs on the bedheads; Marshall bluetooth speakers next to every bed.

The Chelsea was never a cookie-cutter proposition and there are 14 different types of rooms and suites, plus four apartments – ranging from a small Studio up to a Deluxe two bedroom piedà- terre with a kitchen and marble benchtops.

Unbelievable as it may seem, the property never had a bar. Instead, the unofficial clubhouse and meeting place was El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant in the same building that could be accessed from the lobby. It had been around since 1930 but closed in 2018.

Now it’s back, smaller in size but retaining the long bar, the red leather booths, the huge Don Quixote mural down one wall and a menu featuring its signature paella.

And now the Chelsea finally has its own drinking hole. The lavish Lobby Bar is actually a series of adjoined spaces, including a lounge bar and an indoor/outdoor terrace. On the drinks menu are signature cocktails from famous hotels in London (Duke Martini), Singapore (Raffles’ Singapore Sling) and beyond.

There are about 50 permanent residents in the hotel. One of them is Tony Notarberardino, an Australian photographer who arrived in 1994 and never left. He lives in Room 629, which is actually two connected apartments – one used to be inhabited by Dee Dee Ramone, the bass player in the Ramones, while the other was the home of the late Australian artist, dancer and self-described witch, Vali Myers, whose wild murals and dazzling colour schemes still radiate from the walls.

“The Chelsea is New York history,” says Notarberardino, sipping tea in his living room and stroking his white cat, Coco. “People want to stay here because they want to touch the walls where Jack Kerouac and Patti Smith lived.”

Yet he’s realistic about the changes.

“Obviously it’s not the home for artists it once was. It’s a business. And I get that. I woke up one day and found I was living in a five-star hotel. But no matter how much they’ve cleaned up the hotel, you’ll never get rid of the ghosts of creative energy in the place. That’s why I’m still here.”

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