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It is undeniable that the Chelsea Hotel, or the Hotel Chelsea as it should actually be known, has a long and storied history.

It is an address in New York that, as The Telegraph puts it, “has witnessed an abundance of pleasure, a surfeit of pain, a fair share of deviance, and more than its fair share of genius.”

The hotel stopped operating in 2011, and we know only some of the sordid and splendid details of the place and its people, which included “alcoholic writers, suicidal artists, Trotskyites, drag queens, bohemian eccentrics and all manner of waifs and strays” that roamed the rooms for more than 100 years.

The hotel might have been best immortalised by Leonard Cohen’s song Chelsea Hotel #2, but so many other significant things have happened behind its closed doors over the years.

Speaking of doors, in 2018, 50 salvaged doors from the hotel were put up for auction, where the door to Jack Kerouac’s room sold for $30 000, and Bob Dylan’s went for $100 000.

If only doors could talk, then we would know the full extent of everything that happened there, like whether the shocking allegations put against Dylan in the past week are, in fact, true.

Dylan stands accused of grooming and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl at the hotel in 1965:

A lawsuit filed in New York alleges that over a six-week period, the singer “befriended and established an emotional connection” with the plaintiff, identified only as JC, now a 68-year-old woman living in Connecticut, exploiting his position as a musician to gain her trust, and “lower[ing] JC’s inhibitions with the object of sexually abusing her, which he did, coupled with the provision of drugs, alcohol and threats of physical violence, leaving her emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged to this day.”

Dylan’s representative has denied the allegations, saying: “This 56-year-old claim is untrue and will be vigorously defended.”

Having been built in 1884 as “a cooperative club” for people of “congenial tastes”, the Chelsea opened its doors to all lodgers, many of whom would have been thrown out anywhere else, and turned a blind eye on many things that would put people in jail today.

In the 300 rooms and suites that were created after the hotel become residential, the likes of Mark Twain, Frida Kahlo, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Rothko called it home, with the latter having paid in paintings.

Jackson Pollock was there, too, at one point and doing what he does best. He created a very on-brand mess, except not with paint:

[He] signalled his disdain for the art establishment by vomiting on the carpet of the private dining room where Peggy Guggenheim was trying to introduce important collectors to his work.

Her sister Hazel had the presence of mind to advise the restaurant manager to frame the vomit-stained carpet on the grounds that it would one day be worth millions.

Besides art, it was also a place where literary history was made:

In November 1953 the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas collapsed into a coma in his room, following a monumental bender at the nearby White Horse Inn – “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record,” he said, after polishing off a bottle of Old Grandad – before being carted off to hospital to die.

Charles R Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend, committed suicide there in September 1968. On a happier note, Jack Kerouac and Gore Vidal retired to Kerouac’s room following a Greenwich Village bar crawl, resolving that “we owed it to literary history to couple”.

Patti Smith was there, Madonna lived there, and the playwright Arthur Miller hated it there.

This was the Australian photographer and filmmaker Tony Notarberardino’s room:

There was also a fair share of wildlife that made the Chelsea their home, including cockroaches the size of rhinoceros beetles, along with a monkey, an iguana, a python, and a pet alligator who shared their apartment with ‘Tubby the Tuba’ George Kleinsinger.

Things got rather dark in this hotel, especially after Sex Pistol Sid Vicious was charged with stabbing his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in room 100 in 1978:

Vicious died of a heroin overdose before the case came to trial. Bard wisely subdivided the first-floor suite where the killing occurred to prevent the room becoming a shrine.

But all of this debauchery and madness is well and truly over, with the hotel sold to real estate developer Joseph Chetrit for $80 million in 2011.

Since then, it has changed hands twice and is now undergoing renovations.

I shudder to think about what they’re finding under the floorboards and behind the wallpaper.

[source:thetelegrapth]