From punk to posh: inside the Hotel Chelsea’s second act

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York

If you wanted to look for bohemia in New York, I’m not sure where you’d go now. 

A few decades ago you wouldn’t have hesitated. You’d have headed straight for the Chelsea Hotel. Its red neon fizzed with noirish energy, and its rooms accommodated a portmanteau of unlikely (and sometimes untrue) stories, ones marinated in brilliance, sleaze, drugs, self-absorption and failure.

It’s tempting just to populate any reference to the Chelsea Hotel with names, a roll call that seems almost too perfect, unimaginable in its complete capture of modern culture. It is also unavoidable.

Mark Twain stayed here. Bob Dylan lived here, as did Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Mary McCarthy. It’s where William Burroughs is said to have written The Naked Lunch, Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jack Kerouac wrote some of On the Road. Gil Scott-Heron, Nico, Warhol “superstar” Viva, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Lou Reed and Jimi Hendrix all lived or stayed here, too. Patti Smith shared a room with Robbert Mapplethorpe. Jackson Pollock vomited on the floor in front of Peggy Guggenheim, Brendan Behan narrowly avoided drinking himself to death, and Dylan Thomas did not. Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in these walls. Probably. Sarah Bernhardt slept in her own custom-made coffin.

Sleazy heaven or scintillating hell: take your pick, and write your own history 

Try watching Andy Warhol’s split-screen 1966 movie Chelsea Girls (all three and a half interminable hours are on YouTube) to get a long gaze at the scenesters, the hangers-on and the poseurs, the pop stars, the writers and dancers, the freaks and the junkies, the sexiness, the sex work and the seediness. Most of all, perhaps, you’ll see the boredom and self-regard of what in retrospect looks like a golden age, but was surely also intensely irritating, and pompously self-aware of its own lust for selfish pleasure. Sleazy heaven or scintillating hell: take your pick, and write your own history. 

That version of bohemia, the ability to maintain a creative lifestyle in the centre of the city while drunk, high and finessing your own legend (while producing, perhaps, not that much at all), has long been squeezed out of this neighbourhood by rocketing rents and an intolerance of indolence. But the Chelsea’s neon still glows.

After decades of benign neglect and multiple changes of ownership from the 1990s, the hotel was acquired by BD Hotels (which owns numerous boutique institutions, including the atmospheric Jane nearby). New Yorkers had deep reservations about its future, but the group has succeeded in keeping a number of residents in place and maintaining its eccentric (albeit now cleaned-up) cool.

The Chelsea came roaring back at the end of 2022, ready to accompany the neighbourhood in its current incarnation as an upscale gallery district. Massive redevelopment followed in the wake of the High Line, Manhattan’s elevated rail-line-greenway, creating a channel of self-consciously experimental architecture. The hotel’s terracotta bulk remains a rebuke to those glassy stumps that pixelate into the skyline; the Chelsea exudes presence and charisma, and it is here to stay.

And so was I. Here to stay, that is. When I first entered it maybe 35 years ago, to meet someone in its art-filled, louche lobby (art was often given in lieu of rent), it was not, frankly, a place for hanging around too long. Now it has been subsumed, like so many other Manhattan legends, into luxury. But how do you rebrand a place once synonymous with sleaze as super-desirable? Can you gentrify punk, drugs and the lives of countless failed bohemians and alcoholics? Of course you can. This is New York. Commoditisation of culture is its point. 

Oddly, the Chelsea is buzzier now than it was back then. The lobby, now made slightly chicer with a warming fire in the grate, is still stuffed with art (some still by residents, much not at all good). A cosier selection of sofas and armchairs surround delicate coffee tables. The front desk resembles an old-style grand hotel: the stair winds behind it, and a grid of pigeonholes houses tasselled room keys. The staff are efficient and upbeat.

At street level, the hotel remains a wonderful warren, an intense mix of bars and cafés with a fashionably fin-de-siècle feel, from the gorgeously glam Lobby Bar to the mirrored brasserie-style Café Chelsea, with its booths and zinc counter. The food is mostly French, punctuated by a burger or Maine lobster, and finely cooked. My breakfast bacon was crisp and exceptional. It does get busy later, though — hipper than it ever was.

Cool is evasive, and we often miss its peak. But the Chelsea is, remarkably, still there

The stairs rise through what is now a curious mix of rooms and apartments. Many hotels now feature residences, but at the Chelsea they are jumbled up; because some existing tenants were allowed to stay, the hotel maintains a certain spatial unpredictability. The renovation looks expensive (many bits of the old hotel, including the door to Bob Dylan’s room, were sold off at auction) and the rooms themselves are wonderful. Mine had a balcony overlooking West 23rd Street, gently illuminated by the neon’s rosy glow. The interiors are made of self-consciously eclectic velvety sofas and curtains, bucket chairs and brass coffee tables on a parquet floor. The bathroom is generous and elegant, laden with marble and brass. The bed is big, bookended by pointillist headboard covers on little curtain rails, which are oddly effective in setting a less corporate tone. The creamy white walls are a mistake; high ceilings make the room look a little bare. And the art is still pretty bad.

Up top is the New Yorkiest-imaginable roofscape. Its centrepiece is an eccentric steep-roofed pavilion that became known as Jobriath’s Pyramid, named after its late resident, the first openly gay rock star to be signed by a major label. The hotel has restored it to a rather odd gym, with magnificent views. There’s a cutesy spa on the rooftop too, and a small garden looking over a skyline of water towers, the Empire State framed by monumental brick chimneys. When I visited, the rooftop was mostly empty and wonderfully secluded, an unexpected moment of calm on a street where sirens and horns never fully fade away.

The clientele is also not what it was. Better heeled, better behaved, less eccentrically dressed and more likely to choose a decaf oat-milk latte than a speedball. They seem knowing about the history but at one remove, a gentle awareness of an impossibly distant dream. The Chelsea’s zenith came when Manhattan was in the gutter, a bankrupt city left to the artists, the musicians and the rats. Now, it looks more middle-aged: Botox, bobo and Polo rather than boho. 

In her memoir Just Kids, Patti Smith described the Chelsea as being “like a dolls’ house in The Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe”. That sense of a constellation of weird and wonderful interiors tightly parcelled up in a gothic armature might have dissipated a little, but the vibe abides. When it opened in 1884, The Chelsea was a co-op, a more convivial and communal vision of Manhattan life. The original architect, French-born Philip Hubert, was an admirer of Charles Fourier, who propounded theories of an idealised community in which communal and supportive living supplanted competitive capitalism, women were treated equally and sexuality was open and fluid. It retains some of that difference now in its cocktail of apartments and hotel rooms, its wildly varied bars and restaurants (including New York’s oldest Spanish restaurant, El Quijote) and even a tiny and wonderful guitar store. It has the louche spirit of a dense network of institutions and people bound into a place, and somehow surviving. 

So often, culture is transmuted into nostalgia. The coolest places you find are somehow never quite what they were a few years before you found them. Cool is evasive, and we often miss its peak. But the Chelsea is, remarkably, still there. Perhaps a little too expensive now to be truly cool, but still gently haunted by its sheer density of history. A legend in every room. 

The Hotel Chelsea has 125 rooms and 35 suites. Rooms start at $605. 222 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011. hotelchelsea.com; Directions

Edwin Heathcote was a guest of the Hotel Chelsea

Have you stayed in the Hotel Chelsea, in either its current or previous incarnations? Share your experiences in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter

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