Stuff You Should KnowThe Chelsea Hotel is one of New York City's landmarks for good reason. It's served as housing for bohemian creatives and addicts, and been through several iterations over its history, from divey residential to high-end hotel. Learn all about this legendary place today.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should Know. The Super Cool Edition another edition in our ongoing New York saga to explain every single building or theme or trend in the entire city of New York.
I feel like these are always me, so I'm sorry if I'm foisting these.
Well, you love New York, I do.
Do you know the T shirt told me to.
Oh, I thought it was I Heart New York. Is that what that means?
Yeah? I get it now, but it's iHeart New York. I didn't say you heart New York. I took it all wrong. But now I love that city, so I want to know more about it.
It is a very cool city, and this is a cool place in the city's history. For a long part of the city's history, actually the Chelsea Hotel, which little known fact, is actually supposed to be called the Hotel Chelsea. And I could not find where who first turned it around, because surely it was a poet or a singer or something writer. But at some point it got basically transversed even though the official name is and always has been since it was a hotel, that's the Hotel Chelsea.
Yeah, it can be a little confusing. Same place, though, so don't sweat it. So you can say either one.
But wait, wait, wait, you want to talk confusing. Okay, there's a Marriotte Renaissance Chelsea Hotel in the same neighborhood. I mean I could see myself accidentally booking that and being like, this place is a little more put together than I expected.
Yeah, I mean, Chelsea is a neighborhood and every hotel in there is a Hotel Chelsea. Yeah, a Chelsea Hotel. Rather.
I love Chelsea. I think that is one of my favorite neighborhoods in New York, if not my favorite. We stayed there a bunch of times when we went and visited New York and Chelsea.
Yeah, I like it as well, and I have stayed at the Hotel Chelsea a couple of times.
I have too. But yeah, yeah, but that actually answers a question that I had. I was trying to figure out where you came up with this as a topic. I would have guessed the Taylor Swift song The Tortured Poets department. Okay, because she mentions it in in there, that's I guess, not where. That's not what inspired you to do this.
No club, Dylan. If anybody I got no, I mean from staying there semi recently, and that's the great thing about our job. I was like, Yeah, I wish I knew a little bit more about this place, and here we are.
Yeah, what'd you think of it.
At the hotel? Yeah, well, you know, as as you learn. If you don't know that Chelsea Hotel was renovated over the course of many, many many years after being closed for those renovations, we'll get into all the ins and outs of that. But I thought that it was a top notch renovation that from what I've read, even though it's a fancy pants place now, everything I've read says that they did a very tasteful job. In fact, let me read in fact, so I'm not just talking out of my butt, but one of the people in the New Yorker or something that wrote about it said it presents itself subtly and doesn't scream. I've changed due largely to the fact that the building was landmarked in nineteen seventy seven, so many elements such as its facade and famous stairwell cannot be changed in accordance with this landmark status. Current owners instead have worked with it and around its physical history, and the enhancements are fitting one hundred and fifty eight rooms in fifteen room categories from two hundred square feet, who's seventeen hundred square feet and there you go.
Well, yeah, and that's great that they did a good job with it, because people all the way back to the nineteen forties, with Edgar Lee Masters, the poet author of Spoon River Anthology, who lived there for a while, was worried about the gist of the Chelsea Hotel being stripped away by new owners. And it's changed hands a few times, but it's also stayed in really capable hands for decades. And those capable hands, as will see, helped give the Chelsea Hotel its own, like it's very famous vibe.
Yeah, and I should also say too that a lot of people, I'm sure, think it's an abomination, and a lot of times used the same people that were like, you know, Times Square was better or New York was better when it was a dirt bag city crumbling and you were as likely to get mugged walking the streets, or spray painted on if you stood still for too long, as anything else.
Yeah, So, based on what we'll learn about what went on in the Chelsea Hotel, I think it's very telling how dangerous New York was at the time. That almost to a person when they interviewed residents years later, they say they felt safe in the Chelsea Hotel, and the Chelsea Hotel was as crazy as a place could get. And yet it just goes to show you how much more dangerous it was outside of the Chelsea Hotel in New York at the time.
Yeah, it seemed to have a very familial quality to it. Yea, and for good reason. So let's jump back to the beginning when it was built. First of all, it's right there at West twenty third Street in the Chelsea neighborhood, and it started in eighteen eighty four as the Chelsea Association Building, Nuts and Bolts. It is a twelve story building, was one of the taller buildings in New York at the time. It is a Victorian Gothic. It is a beautiful, gorgeous building. If you look at it from across the street. It's just one of the one of New York's greatest landmarks designed by architect Philip Is it Hubert or Hubert?
I'm going to say Hubert, that's what I would say.
All right, we'll go with that. And Hubert designed it on the philosophy of a French philosopher that he was a fan of named Charles. What is it? I think fer Fourier, who was a utopian socialist and kind of thought this concept of a co op of a community should work in co ops called phalanxes, and that's what the Chelsea started out as, was one of the first housing co ops in New York City, where if you live in a co op, then you own a share of that building along with all the other owners, and you also are responsible for the monies that help maintain and keep up that building.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until you need a new roof exactly. So Hubert actually followed Fourier's vision and turned the Chelsea into not just the co op but an attempted socialist utopian paradise where it wasn't just for the wealthy like that it was I think, I don't know if you said or not. It was one of the tallest buildings in New York at the time, so it was a very tony address when the building opened. And yet he set apartments aside for some of the people who had built the building, like some of the electricians if there was such thing at the time, some of the plumbers, some of the carpenters, like they had shares. They were able to live in this co op because there was room made for them, and there was also room made for artists and musicians and writers. And the point was for everybody to kind of rely on one another. So if you needed plumbing help, you could pay your plumber in you know, a painting or something like that, if your plumber would accept it. Everybody was meant to depend on everyone else and be kind of self sufficient as a unit.
Yeah, uh, not so big into abstract, but yeah, sure, I guess are you going places.
To die?
Exactly? They're also in that very first iteration, and this is very key. You mentioned artists, but there were the top floor had fifteen artist studios up there, and that really kind of carried on throughout the history of the Chelsea until most recently. Yeah, that version of the Chelsea was about around for about twenty one years. It went bankrupt in nineteen oh five, some of those residents stuck around, and then the rest became a hotel, and the Chelsea for decades functioned as a place where you could stay there as a hotel, you could stay there for a month, you could stay there for a week, like weekly and monthly rates, where you could be a resident and live there. It's a very unique situation.
Yeah, And so the rooms also apparently were fairly cheap, especially for a luxury place, a luxury building, so if you were up and coming or starving artists, you could still probably afford a place there. And because it was created to house artists and talent of all different kinds, it was automatically attractive. It just kind of became a place where art was created, not just a place where artists could live. There was a long time Chelsea resident named Harry Smith who I saw described as the archetypal Bohemian trickster figure, and he's just Chelsea Hotel through and through from what I could tell. He said that the hotel exuded atmospheric vibrations that attracted artists and also helped produce great art. So like the building itself and the vibe that was in it, led to better art than maybe would have otherwise been produced, at least according to Harry Smith, who was a trickster apparently, so he might have been lying.
And also, you know, the human brain works in funny ways, and once a place in gets her reputation is at ego in there, and that in itself, you may think you're being inspired just by being there, and that ends up inspiring you. You know what I mean?
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think some people, though I'm not going to name names, but I think over time some artists who stayed there have wanted to kind of capture what that hotel does and maybe bit off a little more than they could chew.
I think, I know you're talking about.
I think you should second to have a second thought or too. If you're like, I'm going to make an ode to the Chelsea Hotel where there's a song, a movie, doesn't matter.
I know exactly what you're talking about. We're not talking about Oh, Henry though, who stayed there a lot. For Mark Twain who stayed there a lot, or Sarah Bernhard who stayed there when she came to New York to perform. Those were all like frequent guests in those early years there, they were artists, you know, very famous artists at the time, occupying those artist studios on the top floor. From the very beginning. They even held some Titanic survivors in nineteen twelve. That's where they went when they were when they were brought in shivering in the cold.
Yeah, which is pretty cool that they opened their door to them. I'm sure other hotels did too, but I thought that was neat. Yeah, and we should say these artists that were staying here, Oh, Henry was hiding from creditors. Yeah, when he stayed there, John French Sloan, he was a member of the Ashcan School of Art, which made its name by showing some of the grittier, more dismal side of New York life, which is totally contrary to the zeitgeist. And so the artists were avant garde. Basically throughout the entire history of the Chelsea Hotel, the artists working there were like the vanguard of the avant garde.
Yeah, and like a bohemian. You'll hear those words throw out a lot when the Chelsea Hotel is described or its tendency over the years.
They were Czechoslovakian to a person.
During the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties. Thomas Wolfe I was a frequentor there. In fact, he died. He spent the last years of his life there in Room eight twenty nine, writing things like you Can't Go Home Again. And he died very young though, from tuberculosis, at the age of thirty seven, and was known to kind of, you know, paste the halls looking for inspiration or that next paragrapher sentence.
Yeah, I saw that. Somebody said he ran out into the street one night at like three am and shouted that he'd written ten thousand words in one day. That's great, that's pretty substantial. And Thomas Wolf also not to be confused with Tom Wolf. No, No, he was an influence in his own right. He influenced the Beats, mainly through Jack Karawak. He influenced the new journalists, so ironically, Thomas Wolf influenced Tom Wolf.
Yeah.
And in fact, there's a story that Fear and Loathing from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and at the Kentucky Derby that Hunter Thompson took that from a Thomas Wolfe's story.
Oh okay, yeah, that's pretty cool. We saw him. It done one on Hunter S. Thompson either.
Now he might be undue. You know how remember the time we did that live shows the Worst Idea, where we did how humor works and we realized part way through in front of a live audience that explaining humor is like the least funny thing you can do.
I don't remember that. Was that a like a tour show or was that like for a it.
Was a podfest?
Was it really?
Yeah? In La Here's bad.
I blocked that one out.
Yeah, I don't remember.
So you mentioned a lot of people have you know, done their odes to the hotel, whether it's movies or songs or whatever. Perhaps the first one was a guy named Edgar Lee Masters lived there from thirty one to forty four and wrote a poem called the Hotel Chelsea, So he kind of got the ball rolling.
Yeah, and he's the guy I was saying earlier wrote Spoon River Anthology that was yeah, worried about it being about it losing its vibe.
Well, let's read this first couple of lines. Then. Don't know who that is, but he's writing it to Anita. Soon this Chelsea Hotel will vanish before the city's merchant, greed, wreckers will wreck it and in its stead more lofty walls will swell. Yeah, there you have it.
Yep. So this was the forties. I'm guessing this was nineteen forty three when it changed hands I think for the first or second time and was finally turned into the Hotel Chelsea. But he had very little to worry about because it got even more avant garde after that.
Yeah, you know, it's kind of had its ups and downs as far as how I mean nice it was. I guess it fell in pretty hard times after World War Two, but it was always you know, Dave described it as gruff but lovable. I mean, it never lost that charm. It seems like yea, even at its divious. Dylan Thomas, the famous author, was a heavy drinker, as I think everyone knows. He drank himself to death. They're at the Chelsea and nineteen fifty three and they have a plaque. They all applaques for everybody, but there's a Dylan Thomas plaque. Dylan Thomas lived and wrote at the Chelsea Hotel, and from here he sailed out to die.
Yeah. I read that on the day that he fell into a coma that eventually he died from he said, I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record. It's gotta be.
Yeah.
So yeah, Dylan Thomas was one of the ones whose death really kind of I don't quite know how to put it, but there's there's certain aspects of the Chelsea Hotel and tragic figures dying in it is part of that. That's an aspect of it in and of itself, and Dylan Thomas kind of set the tone for that, right.
Yeah, immortalized maybe.
Sure, so he became he helped make the Chelsea Hotel famous in that respect by dying as a tragic figure there. Other people are just kind of famous, and because they stayed in the Chelsea Hotel it kind of gives it a little more props. Like Jackson Pollock, he lived there for a little while. Little known fact the CIA paid his rent. No really, virgin No, I'm kidding, Virgil. Have you ever heard the theory that the CIA was behind the abstract expressionist movements to make the United States seem more intellectual to the Soviets?
No, but that makes that joke a very deep cut. So I don't even feel bad this time. Okay for falling for it.
So there are other people too that you may not have heard of that I hadn't heard of, that were longtime residents that really kind of gave it like legitimacy. There was a music critic and composer named Virgil Thompson who was apparently just incredibly prolific. He lived there for fifty years and died in Room nine twenty. Larry Rivers, he's considered the godfather of pop art. He lived there for about a decade. And when you put all this together and then also bring in tours, because don't forget, this is a hotel hell that some people are living in for decades, but there's also people coming and going. And then you also throw in rich people who are basically just trying to hang out with artists, even though they have no artistic talent themselves. It's just the crowd they want to hang with. You put all these people together, and you've got like who you would see if you went into the Chelsea Hotel.
Yeah, exactly, all right, we should take a break and we'll come back and talk about David and Stanley Bard right after this.
Okay, So I said earlier that the Chelsea Hotel was in capable hands for decades, and those hands were initially David Bard and then after that his son Stanley Bard, and between the two of them they took Philip Hubert's vision of this socialist utopia but really the really artsy part of it, and just went to town. I saw it described as Stanley curated who lived in the Chelsea Hotel. It wasn't like, Hey, I've got some money, I want to live here. You basically had to be vouched for by another avant garde artist that probably already lived there. That was a good way to get in.
Yeah, and this I found this funny little fact that you know, how little things can change history. David in nineteen forty three, the elder Bard, he got together with some other investors to buy the hotel out of foreclosure. And the reason he did that is because he was a furrier who was allergic to fur and couldn't take it anymore. So the reason the Chelsea Hotel, one of the reasons that it kind of stayed that thing, is because when David Bard took the reins in nineteen forty three, he kept that spirit alive with the artist and like taking a painting in lieu of rent. Had it gone to just some money hungry, greedy people, it made have completely changed in nineteen forty three, and we wouldn't even be talking about it today. So had he not been a fur or allergic to fur, it may have been a completely different scene there. But he ran the hotel until he died in sixty four, and like you said, Stanley, his son took over. And Stanley Bard was great. He was I've got a pretty fun like Apparently there was never any like problem he couldn't handle. He was known for being able to handle like whatever weirdness was going on there at the time. And Arthur Miller, when he was divorced from Marilyn Monroe, lived there for a period of years and wrote a lot about the Chelsea Hotel. And here's one good example about Stanley Bard called down after being so frustrated with how disgusting his carpet was. Said, for Christ's sake, Stanley, don't you have a vacuum cleaner in the house? He said, of course, we have lots of them. He said, well, why aren't they ever used? He said, they're not used. Stanley, You know g d Welly that you don't use them. I have never heard such a thing. Why don't they use them? Or you're asking me why they don't use them, Well, you're the one who brought it up. Look, Stanley, just get a vacuum cleaner up here, and let's just forget this conversation. Please, fine, how are you otherwise? Truthfully, there is no otherwise. All I am is a man waiting desperately for a vacuum cleaner. And then Arthur Miller said, and then he would laugh, grateful for another happy tenant. And that was like nothing was like ever wrong. Right at the Chelsea people were dying and being wheeled out of there in overdoses, and he would make jokes at like, no, the cops were here because they lived there, and the body bags and the gurneys are just props.
Yeah. So apparently Milosh Foreman a true bohemian. He lived at Chelsea from I think for the early seventies, about the first half of the seventies, and he asked Stanley once if anyone had ever died, I believe, to basically get him to admit yeah, yeah, because there were a lot of deaths, whether it was by suicide, murder, mattress fires overdoses. Yeah, and it was just well known that there were a lot of deaths that happened in the Chelsea Hotel. So Milos Foreman asked Stanley once if he could think of anybody who ever died there, and he could only come up with one person, and he was a painter named al Fais Cole.
That's funny.
He died in nineteen eighty eight, the oldest man in the world at one hundred and twelve. He died at the Chelsea Hotel. And that's the one person that Stanley could think of. And the entire time that he was running the Chelsea Hotel.
Yeah, and Stanley ran it for forty years after his dad died. But like I said, his dad had the same attitude. They asked David the elder Bard why he didn't ever evict a tenant who apparently was playing the drums and everyone was complaining and it was even driving him nuts, And his answer was, I like people.
Yeah, yeah, it was cool, like you could get away with from what I saw, You could get away basically anything up to murder essentially, And Stanley would put up with it because that was the rhythm that his father had kind of laid out, and if you want to cultivate an avant garde artist colony in the middle of New York, you're going to have to do that, or else just give up because it's not going to work otherwise.
Yeah. I got to read this other Arthur Miller quote. It's pretty good too. He said the Chelsea, and this is, by the way, from the Chelsea Affect affect about the Bards. He said, the Chelsea, whatever else it was, was a house of infinite toleration. Yeah. This was the Bard's genius. I thought to have achieved an operating chaos which at the same time could be home to people who were not crazy.
Yeah, which I don't know who those people were.
Yeah.
I saw Matt as a Hatter used more times in the oral history of the Chelsea Hotel than I ever have anywhere else.
Yeah, just about everybody there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So my favorite Arthur Miller quote, by the way, is these pretzels are making me thirsty. Y. It's a great one.
Yeah. So let's jump into the sixties and seventies, because that's when the Chelsea seemed like it had some of its most notable events and residents, even if they were part time my favorite guy. Bob Dylan stayed at the Chelsea, stayed in room two eleven for about three years, you know, off and on because he was going up to Woodstock as well. But sixty one to sixty four is when he was hanging out with Ginsburg and doing his thing. He wrote most of, if not all, of Blonde on Blonde, which is his seventh album, and very specifically in the song Sarah, which was about his wife, his wife Sarah that he married in sixty five. There's a great line in that song storms are bruin in your eyes, No different Sarah. Okay, this one is very skating, tough song. Bob Dylan was the champion of the anti love song. This is kind of one of them. But he said, he writes about staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel writing a sad eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you.
So he references another song on the same Sarah.
Yeah, it's a song to his ex wife, And he said, basically, I remember staying up for days writing sad eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you.
Yeah, and no time is a good time for goodbye.
Have you seen the Dylan movie? Do you care about that at all.
Nope, yeah, gotcha. So, but yeah, that was pretty seminar. I mean, that's one of his biggest albums, right, And I saw that at the time too, that Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol went basically head to head over Edie Sedgwick, who also stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. And apparently that was the end of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick's Red hot I don't know what you'd call it, not a romance, just interaction of relationship. Sure, we'll just go with that, but it was something other than that, and it lasted less than a year. But apparently Andy Warhol was so jealous that Edie Sedgwick had become totally obsessed with Bob Dylan, who may or may not have returned her advances. It just depends on who you ask. Bob Dylan says no that, but Andy Warhol lost because Bob Dylan was at the time, like basically the biggest person in like alternative culture, the counterculture at the time, like even more than Andy Warhol was. Like he was just huge, and it's kind of it's kind of difficult to overstate what a big deal this very big person living and working in the Chelsea Hotel. Like what it did for the Chelsea Hotel's reputation.
Yeah, for sure. And it's also mind blowing to know while Bob Dylan's up there in room two eleven literally typing out one of the seminal albums of all time, at the same time, Arthur C. Clark is adapting the screenplay for two thousand and one A Space Odyssey on a different floor, in a different room, So like these kind of creative you know, and Andy Warhol is in there shooting parts of Chelsea Girls. Like stuff was really really happening. It didn't earn its reputation just it wasn't overblown at all, you know.
Right now, Another really famous thing that happened around that time was from Edie Sedgwick. She set her mattress on fire.
Yeah, and on purpose.
I think was it on purpose because this was not her first department fire.
Yeah, I think it was on purpose.
Okay, So it's possible this is a very turbulent time for her. Yea, she could have been heartbroken over Bob Dylan. She could have been upset Andy Warhol had turned his back on her. I know the previous apartment fire in a different building was because she had shot up a speedball and the cigarette fell out of her mouth and onto her mattress and set her her house on fire.
That's kind of on purpose too, I guess.
So, yeah, but that kind of leads me to something. There's something that just doesn't show up in the histories. I mean here or there. It kind of comes up, but I think it's really understated the effect that had on the community that developed in the Chelsea Hotel from the entire time that the building was open. And that has drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs. Like so everybody from Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress, to Bob Dylan and beyond. I wouldn't put it beyond Ethan.
Hawk, he lived there for a while.
Yeah, So I mean the club kids, like with the Capital C and the Capitol K in the eighties and nineties, like some of them lived there and they were definitely doing drugs. They're like it was just a really big part of the experience of living at the Chelsea Hotel. It was like essentially one of the muses that was walking around the halls of that building all the time.
Yeah, for sure. I mean Gabby Hoffman, the actor. She was raised there from birth till she was eleven years old. Her mom was Viva, who was another one of Warhol's superstars, and little Gaby Hoffman from Sleepless in Seattle. You know, she's a grown lady, you know, middle aged woman now and has talked a lot about it. She loved living there, but you know, she was stepping over people, you know, passed out with hair and needles in their arms, and you know, on her roller skates and just you know, kind of a crazy life. But to her, it was just like, yeah, I just lived in this sort of legendary divy apartment building. Like there was a gazillion non famous ones in New York, this one just happened to be famous. Did see where her mom Viva? Eventually, I don't think it was ever published, but she wrote a book because writers always like very chicully say that like Gabby Hoffman was sort of the Chelsea Hotels answer to Eloise the children's book. And apparently her mom wrote a book called Gabby at the Chelsea. But I don't think I would try to find out think it was ever released.
That's cute. I would love to see that. Yeah, how about some more famous stuff that happened there.
Huh Yeah, like Liaison's Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen. That's a big one.
Yeah. He wrote about that in Chelsea Hotel number two, one of his songs, very famous song. So they were together from sixty eight to seventy when Janis died. I don't know if they were like an item or if they just, you know, liked hanging out.
If you know, sure, I think I know Jimi.
But regardless, they were just a famous couple from there. Yeah, that's not the right word. I'm having trouble pulling words out of the air. Another couple that you could probably call more of a couple was Patty Smith and Robert Maplethorpe. They moved into the Chelsea They were totally broke at the time. Patty Smith became like the poet of the punk scene. Robert Maplethorpe famously became the devil incarnate with his.
Photos, provocative pictures, that's.
One way to put it. Sure of BDSM culture and gay culture in the eighties, and like almost got the National Endowments for the Arts canceled, Although I think it's unfair to say it was him. Jesse Helms almost got the NEA canceled, and it was Robert Maplethorpe was just making art and Jesse Helms just did not think a bullwhip coming out of a man's rectum was art.
That's right. I had that book. I haven't read yet. It's on the shelf with a bunch of other rock and roll books that I have yet to get to. But the Jesse Helms story no exactly what a rock and roll Patty Smith's book that she wrote about her time with maple Thorpe, I think it's called Just Kids that I'm looking forward to getting into. But boy, can I tell a quick Patti Smith Bob Dylan story. Is there nothing to do with the Chelsea Hotel?
Yeah?
Well, you know what I'm gonna say, it does I'll say she told him here. If you're a Dylan fanuel like this, you can just check out for a second. But on Bob Dylan's very famous Rolling Thunder tour that he took up in seventy five seventy six, some people look at that as like some peak Dylan live performance, unbelievable stuff. But he has a performance of his song isis one of his great songs after the record is off the record Desire where it's just one of the great live performances of anyone ever is his performance on Rolling Thunder of Isis and he doesn't play the guitar and he's just standing there and he didn't do that a lot. And he Patty Smith is the one who encouraged him. He said, Bob, you should, you should do Isis without the guitar. And he said, Patty, I don't know what to do with my hands, and she said, make them into fists.
So did he yell, heck, yeah, you did, okay?
And Patti Smith that wrote also about the Chelsea a lot in the restaurant there. It's not officially part of it, but it's connected. You can get to it through the hotel. Al Quixote underwent a lot of renovations to reopen. It was a pretty big dive of a place back then, but it was cheap food and it was Spanish food, and so people ate there, even though apparently the food wasn't good. I saw it described was it. The piea could have been consistency of yesterday's oatmeal. The taste of the sangria might be best described as purple but before the Woodstock Music Festival, Patty Smith went to the Chelsea or was living there, I guess, And she said, I walked into Alcahoti's Bar one afternoon in nineteen sixty nine to find musicians everywhere, sitting before tables laid with mounds of shrimp and green so payea, pictures of sin gree and bottles of tequila. Jefferson airplane was there, so was Janis Joplin and her band Jimmy Hendrix sat by the door. Like, can you like just walking into a restaurant and seeing something like that happening? Incredible?
Yeah?
Yeah, you'd be like, I don't really care about any these people, No I do.
I love Jimmy Hendrix, and clearly I love at least Jefferson Starship.
Right, you were like, one day you don't know it yet, you're gonna write a song called Sarah, that's right.
And I spent at least one summer just listening to Dennis Joplin's greatest hits over and over again, so I could be down with that scene.
Man, Should we take a break, Yeah, all right, we'll be right back and we'll finish up on the Chelsea Hotel, right, for this. All Right, we talked about people dying at the Chelsea, so we should probably talk more specifically about this because it seemed to happen a lot.
Right, Yeah, there were people who jumped out of windows. Remember it was a twelve story building and this was nothing new. People. There was a there's a rumor of a ghost of a woman who supposedly lived. There was an artist who was upset with herself and cut off her hand and then threw herself out the window. And this would have been in the first couple decades of the twentieth century. But it didn't stop with her. It just kept going and going and going. And then even if someone didn't die by suicide or it wasn't murdered or their place wasn't set on fire, just the day to day grimy grittiness of it of heroin addicts like shooting up in the bathrooms or sex workers like washing their underwear in the bathrooms. That was another quote from the Oral History of All Places that Vanity Fairhead on the Chelsea Hotel, Like there was just a definite dark side to it, which was just kind of underscores what I was saying before. The people were like and I felt so safe there, and it was like, what was it like outside of this building? If this was what it was like inside, you know.
Yeah, that's a good point. There was a very notorious death there, depending on who you ask. Said Vicious murdered his girlfriend Nancy Spongeen there in room one hundred in October of nineteen seventy eight. We can't say for sure because he denied it to his last days, which was before he went to court. He died of a heroin overdose before he was able to go to trial for that. But what we do know it's it. Nancy Spongeen was stabbed to death there.
Yeah. There's a a biographer author named Phil stre Man or Strongman. I would call myself Phil Strongman if that were my name. But he wrote a punk nonfiction book, I guess called Pretty Vacant, and he points to rockets Red Glare, who was a bodyguard for the Sex Pistols at the time, who was the last person known to have seen Nancy Spongent alive. And there was also supposedly a bunch of money cash in the apartment that couldn't be accounted for after her body was discovered. So he makes a pretty good case. Apparently also Rockets Red Lair was admitted to it later on to some people, So who knows, But I don't think it was sid vicious.
Yeah, I know Rockets Red glare from a lot of those early Jim Jarmish movies. Interesting dude, Rufus Wainwright lived there in two thousand to work on a record, and there's a pretty funny story there where he was. He called down to the front and asked that they could send up a quart of milk, and apparently the bellman arrived with a tray full of just tons and tons of drugs because milk, beknownst to Rufus, was the code word at the Chelsea four drugs.
Yeah, because he was the only person in the history of the hotel who actually wanted milk at one point.
And you mentioned Ethan Hawk or that's about say old friend. We don't have nothing to do with him, you know. I love Ethan Hawk. I think he's a great passionate, artistic dude. But he lived there for three years when he was sort of I don't know think he was fully divorced, but was when he was with Uma Thurman. They were kind of on the rocks. Yeah, and he made the movie Chelsea Walls in two thousand and one, which is a series of short films about a day in the life of people at the Chelsea Hotel.
So you know something about him. I've become more and more of a fan over the years. I think he's really kind of grown into his talent.
Yeah, yeah, I think it's I like the guy a lot, and I like his daughter, and I like I think I am a big fan of that family. Yeah. Who's his daughter, Maya Hawk? She's an actor.
No, I don't know, I'm not familiar.
Up and coming. She's on Stranger Things is probably what most people know are from these days.
Oh okay, so what else, Chuck?
And she looks just like Uma. Oh really Yeah, it's really funny. I mean a little bit of Ethan in there, but she's got Imma's mannerisms and voice. It's pretty cool. Nice.
So you mentioned that the Chelsea Hotel underwent renovations for a long time, over a decade. From what I saw, the whole thing started when Stanley Bard was forced out back in two thousand and seven or eight. I saw both Remember that his father, David Bard, had purchased the Chelsea with two other families, two other men. Well, their errors were basically like, you are not making money here, like he was very Stanley was very famous for accepting art in lieu of rain if you were hard, you know, down on your luck, but you were an artist, like he would just you know, look the other way for a few months. Like he was not running it like a business, and he was very open about that. So apparently the airs of the other two owners were like, you need to get out. We have two thirds of a vote and you're out. And that was when things just kind of, yeah, big bummer. Things just started to change because a few years after that they sold it to some investors. I think that was in twenty eleven. They sold it for eighty million dollars. The investors came in, fired all of the staff because they were union, and brought in non union workers. They did away with basically everything that was cool and intangible about the place, and they also took down all the art, Like one of the things Stanley did was hang art by the artists who'd lived there all throughout the place, it was just laden with art. They took all of it off the walls, put it in storage. Apparently some that was, and Stanley's that wasn't. The hotels too. The Larry Rivers Foundation is suing to get one of his paintings back that they say was just on loan, and from that point on it just became kind of ham fisted and not very pleasant for the people who lived there in the Chelsea.
Yeah, it's very controversial renovation because, like you said, there's still people living there. Some of those residents held out and fought it and for as long as they could. Some other residents were mad at those residents because they were like, we're just living into under construction because it's taking forever. Because you're fighting this like it's going to happen. Just give up so we can at least get this finished and live in normal life again. So it really, you know, it depends on your perspective. There's a really, really good documentary that I highly recommend called Dreaming Walls from twenty twenty two where they go inside a lot of these original residence apartments see what they're like. There are also some good books about this. From what I found as of now, I think there's about forty of them still there. Original residence in those apartments and when you stay there. You're walking down the hall to your room and all the doors look the same, and then you'll come across the door that's not the same, and that's an original resident.
Yeah, which is pretty cool that they're still there. They're also rent controlled, I believe, which is how they're sure.
Yeah, and it is one of those things where I really like staying there, but I feel like, man, I bet these people hate people like me that like staying here is walking around I know, and like, you know, with my nine year old daughter, who's not Gabby Hoffman.
Right, she's not on roller skates, she's not an uncle Buck.
I know. So have very mixed feelings about the whole thing about like if staying there support that kind of action in general or.
Well, you know, you bring that up. I thought that too, you mean, and I say there a couple of times over the years we did the most avant garde thing you can do. We stayed at the Chelsea Hotel when we went to see comedian Tom Rhodes at the Gotham Comedy Club next door.
Oh that's very close.
Yeah, he's super undergone. But I mean, I totally get that feeling that you're talking about where it's just like this was something and now is this the like the dulled up version, like kind of the fake disneyfied version of what it used to be? And that leads me to a question that I had throughout researching this, Chuck, where is whatever the Chelsea Hotel was? Now? Where is it? I don't think it's in New York anymore. I don't think it's something like that can survive in New York because it's just gotten so wealthy and wealthy and wealthy and wealthiness is not really it doesn't really jibe with what the Chelsea Hotel was. And it's heyday, So like where is it? Is it somewhere else in the world? Is it in Kansas? Like where did this go? I really want to know who's doing really interesting cool work these days? Where can you find it? Or is it just not around?
I know, I'm with you. And also the notion of like it's a pretty easy target, but like you know, I bet the Holiday and Express and Times Square kicked out some residents for whatever building they took over. You know, like, is there any hotel group on the earth that isn't gross and did things like that in these dense cities?
Yeah. I mean, look what happened to San Francisco, Like it lost a lot of it's Oh yeah, I don't want to say luster, because it wasn't luster that made it so charming, but it lost some of its jam.
Yeah for sure. But you know, El Quixotie is awesome now. They've got some really good chefs that work there. You know, A big shout out to John Paccini, he's the general manager there. He's the stuff you should know, listener. He's always been very kind to me, so big shout out to him, and he's just he's done a great job. And the pie is good now. And I've had some really great experiences in that restaurant and in that hotel. The lobby bar there is amazing, Like it's a truly great place to go have a drink. And if you if you stay there, you can get in. But if you don't stay there, you can still go get a drink there. I would recommend it. So I don't know, it's It's definitely makes me question things. But like I said, is there a place in New York where original residents weren't screwed over in some way or another to make way for some new expensive thing.
Oh. I mean also not just like people living there, I mean like the art, the tho oh yeah, the artistic vibe that was there where total because it's not like no, I you.
Know, I know, I know, And a lot of those forty residents or some of them are still artists making art there.
Yeah, for sure, they just got to.
I don't know if that documentary was accurate, but I think that the residents either aren't allowed to use the main entrance or maybe they just prefer not to.
I could see either one. Actually I really could too. Actually, well that's it for the Chelsea Hotel. We could keep going on and on and on, but I feel like this is a good place to stop, don't you.
Uh yeah. I mean, let's quickly mention that there were some very famous things auctioned off. Some of the famous doors. Bob Dylan storer was auctioned off. I think either Leonard Cohen or Janis Joplin store was auctioned and that iconic sign, as best I can figure, was renovated. But part of that renovation included replacing the letters, and those original letters were sold off.
Cool. Thank you for figuring that out, because I could not make heads or tails of how the sign was restored, but then they auctioned off the sign.
Yeah, I think just pieces of the original. You know, you got to see on both sides and H and E on both sides, and you know, I think you found even that they had them wired so you could put it in your your loft and light it up.
Pretty awesome, pretty cool. Uh Okay, Well that's it. That's it for Chelsea Hotel. If you want to know more about the Chelsea Hotel, go check out the Chelsea Hotel. And since I said Chelsea Hotel three times, as was foretold in two thousand and eight, I've unlocked listener mail.
That's right, and to prevent another listener mail. Yes, we know naked Lunch was written.
There, thank you, Thank you, sir, And a lot of.
Other stuff was written there. You can't cover it all, no, Hey, guys, this is about inner monologues too, because I mentioned, aside from me thinking weird things when I'm falling asleep, I mentioned Emily's thumb spelling, and it turns out a ton of people do stuff like that, and I told her and she was just delighted to find out that she is in a club. Hey, guys over after a decade, I finally have the inspiration to write. On the latest episode, Chuck mentioned Emily spells outwords with their thumb while stressed. I do something extremely similar, but instead of tracing the letters, I spell them out in the sign language alphabet.
Wow.
And there were all kinds of variations. Some people air type, sometimes it's cursive, sometimes it's sign language. It's really interesting. I spelled them out and sign language alphabet, have been doing it since I was at least eleven, and have never heard of anyone else spelling out words well stressed. I would love to know the reason, but I'm also just content to know that someone else has a similar eccentricity. Thanks for sharing such a lovely anecdote of what it means to love someone with all their little oddities. And peccadillos one of my favorite words. Yeah, it's the acceptance and enjoy in the mundane and extraordinary in life that keeps me coming back every week for a new episode. I'm a sandwich listener. I'm sure you're going to get dozens of these emails claiming to be Emily's long lost finger spelling twin, But I had to write in because I've always wanted to stay weird. And Lauren Nider or Niter, I'm not sure how you pronounce it. You are in a larger club because we got heard from a lot of you.
Yeah, that's really cool. I'm glad. Emily's delighted. Yeah, I'm delighted too, me too. Well, if you want to be like Lauren and write in and let us know that you're a part of a club too, well, we love to hear that kind of stuff. You can send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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