One of the architectural delights of Hotel Chelsea is the ornate staircase that reaches from the ground floor all the way to the top floor, a staircase that isn’t accessible to the public, only to registered guests. An early story of the Chelsea to make the papers the world over was when several of the survivors of the sinking of the Titanic were taken there to live because of the hotel’s proximity to Pier 54 where they arrived.
The Chelsea became even more celebrated around the globe as a place where writers and artists not only lived but created some of the greatest works of art and literature of the modern age. This fact is something that interests me a lot, since it’s been my experience that I’ve produced more work as a hotel resident than I ever did otherwise. The people and achievements associated with the Chelsea are too numerous to recount here. They would, in fact, make a book all by themselves and have done so a number of times, including in Ed Hamilton’s excellent Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Legends and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca. The short list of highs and lows at the Chelsea includes Arthur C. Clarke writing his landmark novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jack Kerouac penning his bohemian novel On the Road. Other authors who lived in the Chelsea are Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Thomas Wolfe, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Charles R. Jackson wrote the novel The Lost Weekend while living in the Chelsea, then killed himself there. It is also a legend that poet Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning in his suite at the Chelsea, but that isn’t entirely true. He collapsed in his home at the Chelsea but didn’t die until a few days later in a hospital.
Filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Milos Forman also resided in the Chelsea, as did actor/director/author Ethan Hawke. When I spoke with Hawke about his sojourn at the Chelsea, he said, “I have never been so inspired by a place ever, and not inspired in any way that is conscious. I cannot say that because of this I was inspired to do that. The whole fucking place just seemed to be alive, literally alive, like you could feel it breathing and thinking.” Hawke refers to the Chelsea in his novels Ash Wednesday and The Hottest State, and in 2002 he made a film called Chelsea Walls, which he directed and financed himself. It was shot on digital video and was a look at a day in the life of several artists living in the Chelsea at the same time.
Musicians who have called the Chelsea home are Edith Piaf, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, and Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols, who, on October 12, 1978, stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in their suite. Visual artists once in residence at the Chelsea include Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Willem de Kooning, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many of Andy Warhol’s crew. Warhol made a film in 1966 entitled Chelsea Girls about the female members of his so-called Factory who called the Chelsea home.
New York City’s Hotel Chelsea is much loved by creative types as a short-term or long-term residence. Authors, artists, filmmakers, and musicians such as Mark Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dylan Thomas, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diego Rivera, Milos Forman, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Dylan, Sid Vicious, and Edith Piaf have stayed here.
At present the Chelsea is still the residence of a number of long-term occupants, the longest of whom is Susanne Bartsch, a Swiss-born socialite who makes a living organizing and hosting outlandish New York nightlife parties. She has lived in the Chelsea for 20 years. Today the hotel has been refurbished into a respectable, almost upscale hotel. It wears its history proudly, but if you’re coming to the Chelsea to stay where Jack Kerouac drank and feverishly wrote On the Road, then you’ll be staying within the same walls, of course, but the place will be worlds away from the 1950s.
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A trend I find curious arose in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hoteliers bought up warehouses or office buildings and converted them into small hotels with a few rooms and rechristened them “boutique” hotels, even though they weren’t that by classic definition. They were merely small hotels. In the swinging 1960s in London, England, the term boutique hotel came into existence to describe establishments that were smaller, catered to the hip crowd, and offered amenities the big hotels couldn’t, such as addressing guests by their first names and providing particular needs ahead of being asked simply by knowing what those needs were. Now any hotel under 100 rooms receives the boutique label, even though they are nothing more than smaller versions of big hotels.
I spent some time in one such New York City “boutique” hotel that was considered super-chic and described itself as a seamless fusion of uptown luxury and downtown cool: the Chambers Hotel on Fifth Avenue just off 56th Street. Location-wise you couldn’t ask for a better spot. The Chambers is steps away from the main shopping section of Fifth Avenue and a short stroll to Broadway and Times Square, but the suites seem to strain, groan, and stretch themselves into an approximation of ultra-cool so that you won’t notice that the lobby is tiny, the lounge area is claustrophobic, and that what you can order to eat is extremely limited. The suite I was in had bare industrial concrete walls. The ceilings, too, were brutalist concrete, only they had exposed air duct tubing, as well. The bathroom had a modern rain shower but was quite tight and small. Notepaper on the desk was on a roll. You rolled it out onto the desk, made notes, then tore it off.
Of course, I understand the need to be unique and a little cooler than the guy down the block, but a hotel needs to consider one thing above all else — comfort. Every hotel guest I’ve ever questioned answers comfort when I ask what the first thing they expect from a hotel they’ve chosen. And while I’m not saying the Chambers Hotel doesn’t have an atmosphere of New York hipster cool, I can only relate my personal experiences with it. Waking up that first morning there, I had the feeling I was secretly moved during the night from a hotel room to the boiler room in the basement.
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In Canada the hotel landscape that resembles New York’s the most is Montreal’s. Both cities have a vast array of big old hotels with rich histories, brand-new modern versions of boutique hotels, and large convention-size chain hotels all functioning alongside one another by providing guests with what they need and expect. A Montreal establishment about the same size as the Chambers Hotel in New York is Hotel Godin at 10 Sherbrooke Street West. The chief difference between the Chambers and Hotel Godin is that the latter (which has the maiden name of my mother coincidentally) offers up minimalist cool, elegance, and chic but does so by enveloping its guests in shaded comfort. The walls are painted deep red, dark orange, and dark grey, and the rooms and suites have a high-tech look, but the beds and furniture are comfortable and cozy.
Hotel Godin was troubled since it opened in 2004. It never established a proper restaurant, which is essential in any hotel for it to be recommended over another hostelry. Because the hotel has a good location and because it was beautifully designed, it caught the eye of West Coast developer Trilogy Properties, which stepped in and transformed the place from the Godin into Opus Montreal. The first thing the new boss, John Evans, did was put in motion a multi-million-dollar plan to add a 1,800-square-foot restaurant as well as complete the never-finished terrace lounge and add an additional 500-square-foot bar separate from the restaurant. The scheme involved making the former Hotel Godin as close to what a real boutique operation should be.
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In the 1950s, British-born but Canadian-raised author Arthur Hailey was a writer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and got his first taste of success when he wrote a television drama called Flight into Danger, which was about a plane put into peril because of food poisoning.