Checking In

It is strange how people seem to belong to places — especially to places where they were not born.

— CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, The Berlin Stories

THE LOBBY: A ROGUE'S GALLERY

When the spiky-haired tourist had taken his photograph and proceeded out the big glass front door, I hurriedly grabbed my bags and stepped out from under the candy-striped awning and inside the Chelsea's famous lobby.

The place was stone quiet and more cramped than I'd envisioned. Artwork was ubiquitous, paintings crammed up and down the yellow walls. There was the ornate Victorian fireplace, its mantelpiece sporting Rene Shapshack's bust of Harry Truman.

Of all people to honor on the mantel of the anti-establishment Chelsea Hotel! The little bullet of a president from Missouri who dropped the atom bomb on Japan. The symbol of true blue America fair-and-square, showcased prominently here at Bohemian Central. No doubt the hotel's manager and part-owner Stanley Bard had long-since transcended the irony. No doubt he could wax on about how, back in the day, he had bartered X amount of Shapshack's rent for the statue and how much its value had multiplied over the years.

The quality of the Chelsea's lobby art is up for dispute. Its placement on the walls didn't seem to follow any organizing principle. Larry Rivers' pop-art masterpiece "The Dutch Masters" hangs prominently in all its glory, but what's with the huge, goofy, amateurish painting of a black flowerpot? To the right of the fireplace, there's a nice Phillip Taaffe pin-wheel abstraction, but over there, above the display case full of travel brochures, there's a tinsel metallic curly-cue contrivance that hurts the eyes.

My brother-in-law Robert Campbell states it more plainly.

ROBERT CAMPBELL

In the lobby, you've got some of the crappiest artwork you ever saw in your life. Some of it looks like artwork you'd see in the waiting room of a doctor's office. But there's some stuff that's good.

The real reason for the art's spotty quality may be simpler.

MARY ANNE ROSE

Stanley took the best paintings home.

Stanley Bard, the hotel's manager and part owner for over fifty years, has denied accepting artworks in lieu of rent payments (the hotel's co-owners would have probably disapproved). But the residents know better. Not only was the lobby chock full, but every hallway on every floor was lined with paintings, prints, and drawings. Every stairway was plastered with artwork strung up in diagonal rows. Mobiles hung from the ceilings — sculptures rose from the floors. Did the artists just donate their work out of adoration for Bard and the hotel?

The Chelsea's abundant art may not be worth all that much. In a recent legal dispute between the hotel's owners, the artwork — so much that if they pulled it all off the walls you'd think the building would collapse — was appraised at a total of only around $900,000. More evidence that Bard took the best stuff home.

As I carried my bags through the lobby, I recognized, to my left, the cubby-like room I'd seen in movies, the iconic little space with the payphones and the marble floors. In the 1980s, cell phones were almost nonexistent. And despite the fact that two-thirds of the residents were not transients, but "permanent," living there indefinitely, the Chelsea was still, after all, a hotel. As with any hotel, outgoing phone calls made from your room were outrageously expensive. So residents plodded down to the lobby's payphones.

JULIE EAKIN

In the middle of the night or whenever, we'd always be going down there in pajamas. Calls cost a dime. You'd pull the doors shut — it was one of those glass jobs, so you could see all the business going on in the lobby as you were sitting in there talking.

What made the little phone room iconic wasn't the marble floors or the phone booths themselves, but what happened there over the phone, from the ordinary to the sublime: lovers arranging rendezvous, having knockdown drag outs, ordering pizzas or pot. Actor Ethan Hawke, understanding the payphones' symbolic resonance as the counterculture's Communications Central, featured them in his movie Chelsea Walls.

Architecture is Frozen Music

You can't talk about Chelsea culture or people without talking about the building itself. A building's character, after all, shapes the characters inside.

DIMITRI MUGIANIS

The Chelsea is almost like a beautiful fortress. Architecturally, it was gorgeous! There were balconies I liked to sit outside on. In addition, inside, the staircase is beautiful, and there were working fireplaces in the rooms. I know they've fixed the hotel up now, but the state of disrepair it was in when we lived there, was so charming, like a beautiful old whore whose beauty was fading.

JULIE EAKIN

The building was a little macabre — it was much disheveled when I lived there with Dimitri. It was not kept well, nothing like it is now. It was much dingier — it wasn't cleaned as often. Almost anybody could easily sneak up the back stairway into the hallways.

It cost five hundred dollars a month for a big, square room with a beautiful fireplace that didn't work. There were the two bays with the front doors and the balcony, and it had beautiful parquet floors and tall ceilings that must have been twelve feet high. The bathroom was outside in the hall and was shared by two other apartments, one on either side.

The Hotel Chelsea has an ugly-duckling sort of stateliness. Built during the transition between Victorian and Edwardian periods, it shows the influence of both. Call it Awkwardian. If you were to show an innocent bystander a picture of the building, they might guess it was an old insane asylum, back when straitjackets were in vogue. With its high gables, skinny chimneys, its homely-ornate brick façade, and florid wrought-iron balconies, the Hotel Chelsea is gothic, at least in the literary sense of the word.

The hotel's fortress-like construction had its advantages, especially when it housed a bunch of hard-living libertines. Its builders made the interior walls extra-thick for two reasons, the first being so residents wouldn't be bothered by their neighbors' noise; the second was to prevent fires from spreading from room to room. In fact, the builders poured sand, a dependable fire retardant, between the building's steel girders to prevent this from occurring and risk engulfing the whole hotel. When Chelsea rooms have caught fire, they may have burned themselves bare, smoke and flames surging outside through the windows, but the adjoining rooms were not...