An Oral History of New York’s Chelsea Hotel
There are few hotels on the planet with a music history as rich as the one of the Chelsea Hotel. Residents have included Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and punk’s lovely couple, Sid and Nancy. (Sid allegedly stabbed Nancy to death in room 100 in October 1978; he died of an OD before he could come to trial.)
The Chelsea is no more–at least as a hotel. It’s being turned into condos. Vanity Fair has this look back on the Chelsea’s legacy with an oral history.
Today the halls of the Chelsea Hotel are salted with dust. The hundreds of paintings that adorned its walls have been locked away in storage. The doors to abandoned apartments are whitewashed and padlocked. Hotel operations ceased in 2011 for the first time in 106 years, and now the few remaining residents roam the echoing corridors like ghosts.
They have watched workers haul out antique moldings, stained glass, even entire walls. Ancient pipes ruptured during renovations, flooding apartments, and neighbors returned home from work to find their front doors sealed in plastic wrap. The Chelsea’s new owners say that the building had fallen into dangerous disrepair, and they are restoring it to its original condition.
Some residents believe that they are being forced out, and that the Chelsea as they know it—and as it was known to residents from Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe to Sid Vicious and Jasper Johns—will soon vanish before the city’s merchant greed.
