Tuesday, 4 October 2011

At NYC's Chelsea Hotel, The End Of An Artistic Era?

The fabled Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan was home to Mark Twain, Virgil Thomson and Brendan Behan. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, there. Jack Kerouac worked on On the Road. Bob Dylan wrote "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Artists Larry Rivers and Mark Rothko, and scores of painters and photographers also spent creative time there. But now the future of the hotel is up in the air.
Multimedia and performance artist Nicola L. has been at the Chelsea some 30 years. She came, she returned to France, she rented another New York apartment, and then she returned. "You come back to Chelsea like you go to your mother when something is wrong," she says.
But the building has been sold. Once filled with art by residents, the walls and stairwells are mostly bare now. Only the long-term residents remain. The staff — some of whom had been there for decades — have been let go. When the staff left, says Nicola L., "the bellman, the people at the desk — it was like we didn't have family anymore and we were in an empty boat. "
The Chelsea Hotel is unlike any other in New York. It's split between rental apartments, and tiny hotel rooms where people could stay for a night. Ed Hamilton, author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, has lived there for 16 years. The first apartment he had cost him $500 a month.
"It must have been 100 square feet," he says. Now he lives with his wife in a room that's twice that size but seems minuscule: no kitchen, the bathroom is down the hall, clothes are hanging on the walls.
"I came here to be a writer because it seemed like the place to go," he says. "I was in my mid-30s. We had always heard about this place because Thomas Wolfe had lived here, and the beat writers."
The hotel is filled with ghosts. Not only those of Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death at the Chelsea, or Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious, who was stabbed to death in their room, but all kinds of ghosts. Sherill Tippins has spent six years writing a book on the Chelsea. She once brought a friend to the hotel who claimed she could see ghosts.
The friend was up all night, talking to the ghosts, Tippins reports. "She told me, 'They're everywhere — in the elevators and in the lobby, and they want attention so much.' " Larry Rivers, the "leading ghost," told the friend: "It is not about the art, it is about the life. That is the important thing here..."