If walls could talk, the rooms at the Chelsea Hotel would never shut up.
It opened in 1884 as an 80-unit luxury co-op called the Chelsea Association Building, but around the turn of the century it morphed a rental outfit, with the "hotel" part coming later. Still, despite its name, the iconic 12-story Victorian Gothic structure at 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan has always been more of a residence for eclectic souls to hang their hats than a check-in-for-a-week-with-the-kids destination.
Deemed a historic New York landmark in 1966, the Chelsea has seen everyone from Mark Twain to Titanic survivors to the Beat poets to Ethan Hawke pass through its doors. An incalculable amount of art has been produced under its roof, and the place itself has inspired movies, books and music, name-checked in songs across multiple decades by the likes of Bob Dylan and Phoebe Bridgers and serving as a watering hole for creative types from all over the world.
Dreaming Walls, a new documentary directed by Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, delves into the recently renovated building's lofty origins, bohemian evolution and persistently unique aura.
In a time in which so much is knocked down to make way for something else, the Chelsea remains a still-standing testament to what was, even though under new management the notoriously drug-fueled merriment has long since subsided and the remaining long-term residents are most likely the last of their kind as the long arc of real estate bends toward boutique hotels.
While Dreaming Walls, which opens in limited theatrical release July 8, probes the architectural and spiritual bones of the Chelsea Hotel (or, as the highbrow-minded have preferred to call it, the Hotel Chelsea), it would take more than 80 minutes to encompass all the important, inspiring, exciting, unfortunate, wild, tragic and just plain weird stuff that's happened in the building over the course of 138 years.
So here's some of it, in no particular order:
1. Perhaps nothing has rattled the Chelsea's walls more than the fatal stabbing of 20-year-old Nancy Spungeon, seemingly at the hands of her boyfriend, Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, in Room 100 on the hotel's first floor. The 21-year-old Brit woke from a drug-induced slumber on the morning of Oct. 12, 1978, to find Nancy dead in the bathroom.
Sid was charged with murder but died at a friend's Greenwich Village apartment a few months later while out on bail, having shot heroin and taken four Quaaludes.
Though police said that Sid tearfully told them, "I killed her," when he was arrested, he couldn't remember doing it and many who knew the couple didn't believe he was guilty. Nor, ultimately, did Gary Oldman, who played him in the 1986 film Sid and Nancy. "After all the research I did, I was convinced it wasn't a suicide pact and that Sid didn't murder her," he told the LA Times. Chloe Webb, who played Nancy, called her violent demise "an accident waiting to happen" considering the debauched way they lived.
Whatever the truth, Room 100 was demolished and incorporated into another unit to avoid having a pilgrimage spot for the morbidly curious.
2. Photographer Billy Maynard, who specialized in glam rockers and subversive-for-their-time groups like the Cockettes, who was found beaten to death in his eighth-floor room in 1974. When a contact sheet from a 1973 photo sheet with the drag performer Divine was auctioned off by Beat Books, the lot included the Hotel Chelsea stationery and envelope Maynard mailed it in to Suck editor William Levy.
3. In March 1922, Etelka Graf, the wife of a concert pianist, cut off her left hand with industrial-strength scissors, left the appendage on the bed for her daughter to find, and jumped out of her fifth-story window. She reportedly landed on a third-floor balcony but did not survive the fall.
4. On a 2010 episode of Biography Channel's Celebrity Ghost Stories, Michael Imperioli swore he saw a ghost in the hallway while he was living on the eighth floor of the Chelsea in pre-Sopranos 1996.
According to the lore tirelessly compiled by the stewards of the Chelsea Hotel Blog, a woman named Mary hanged herself in her eighth-floor room after her husband (or possibly fiancé), who was sailing to New York from Europe aboard the Titanic, died when the boat sank in 1912—but her restless spirit doesn't confine herself to one room.
Imperioli doubled down on his sighting on an episode of the Talking Sopranos podcast (which he co-hosted with avowed skeptic Steve Schirripa), recalling that the ghost he saw was a woman dressed in late-19th-century clothes. "I was not the only one who saw this ghost," the actor said, explaining Mary's back story. When he saw her, "I was coming off the elevator and she was by the stairs."
In response to pointed questions about whether he'd been drinking or otherwise under the influence that night, Imperioli insisted he was not.
5. Long before Instagram turned celebrities expressing and celebrating their sexuality into an everyday occurrence, there was Madonna's envelope-pushing 1992 coffee table book Sex, released in conjunction with her album Erotica.
The Material Girl resided at the Chelsea in the early 1980s and she returned to shoot some of the photos for Sex in Room 822.
6. Leonard Cohen's song "Chelsea Hotel #2," which describes a sexual encounter, is rumored to be about Janis Joplin.
According to Sherill Tippins' 2014 book about the hotel, Inside the Dream Palace, Cohen—who had been after Velvet Underground singer Nico, though she largely spurned his advances, once jumping out of their limo to join Jimi Hendrix in his limo—ran across Joplin in the elevator sometime after he moved into the hotel in 1967 (and Joni Mitchell, who lived with him for a few months, had moved out).
Cohen asked Joplin if she was looking for someone, and when she said, "Kris Kristofferson," he replied, "Little lady, you're in luck. I am Kris Kristofferson."
And, so it's told, upstairs together they went.
7. Not the drip technique anyone had in mind, Jackson Pollock threw up in the Chelsea's private dining room during a luncheon hosted by venerable art collector Peggy Guggenheim—who was trying to show him off to fellow influencers—in 1945.
Suspecting she was witnessing the rise of a singular talent, per Tippins' book, Peggy's sister and fellow art expert Hazel Guggenheim McKinley advised the restaurant manager to cut out that piece of spattered carpet and frame it.
8. Dylan Thomas, whose loud, dish-smashing fights with wife Caitlin Thomas at the hotel were legendary, did not go gentle into that good night. Rather, on Nov. 3, 1953, the Welsh poet and writer ventured out of Room 205 in the back of the hotel—a dimmer, danker location than the rooms in the front with the balconies—to drink what he later boasted to fellow Chelsea denizens had been 18 straight whiskeys at the nearby White Horse Tavern. (Per biographers, the bartender who served him said it couldn't have been more than half that number.)
The 39-year-old went out drinking at the White Horse again the following night, and upon his return to the Chelsea he fell violently ill. Concerned friends called an ambulance at around 1 a.m. on Nov. 5 and Thomas was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital a few blocks away. He had pneumonia among other ailments exacerbated by smoking and alcoholism, and he fell into a coma and died on Nov. 9.
9. After reporters easily found him at the luxurious Plaza Hotel, privacy-seeking playwright Arthur Miller retreated to the Chelsea—where a decade prior he'd palled around with Dylan Thomas and other writer friends—in 1961 following the end of his tumultuous marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
In those admittedly shabbier yet creatively stimulating surroundings, Miller penned his quasi-biographical play After the Fall: The Survivor after Monroe died of a barbiturate overdose (deemed a probable suicide) in August 1962—and began the next chapter of his life with third wife Inge Morath, marrying the photographer that winter.
After spending the summer of 1962 at Miller's home in Connecticut, they had returned to the Chelsea that fall, where, Tippins wrote in her book, the couple had "developed a certain fond tolerance for the dusty drapes, leaky refrigerator and 'swamp cooler,' an air-cooling device into which one had to pour pitchers of water and then dodge the spray."
10. Longtime resident Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea, hosting collaborative meetings with Stanley Kubrick in his suite while the director was making his classic film of the same name, the works developing simultaneously. Both came out in 1968.
11. Thomas Wolfe was 6-foot-7 and did a lot of work leaning rather than sitting while toiling away on various works at the Chelsea, including his posthumously released novel You Can't Go Home Again. He wrote in shifts, including midnight to 4 a.m., and his assistant would arrive each morning to type up whatever he'd scribbled out the previous day. The North Carolina native left the Chelsea for the final time after accepting a speaking invitation at Purdue in Indiana, after which he planned to spend the summer of 1938 on the West Coast. He fell ill with a brain abscess in Seattle and died after being transported back across the U.S. to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was 37.
12. Before On the Road was published, Jack Kerouac and fellow writer Gore Vidal had a one-night stand at the Chelsea in 1953. They registered under their real names and, according to Tippins, assured the desk clerk the ledger they signed would be worth money one day.
13. Bob Dylan is said to have written "Visions of Johanna," which ended up on his 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde, while he was living at the Chelsea with wife Sara Lownds. And in his 1975 song "Sara," written when their marriage was foundering, he remembered: "Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / Writin' 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you."
14. Andy Warhol shot his split-screen 1966 cult film Chelsea Girls in various rooms, their last day of filming coming when narcotics officers arrived, a concerned switchboard operator having called the police—so convincing was Bridig Berlin's performance as a drug dealer.
15. The splash that Warhol's film made (culturally if not critically) prompted laments from insiders that the movie painted the hotel in a crackpot light, the mystique of the place—despite stories of residents' exploits—having always been a source of pride for Chelsea denizens.
Arthur Miller noted, per Tippins, that the hotel's "quiet and respectable" reputation had become "wild and unmanageable." And former resident Bob Dylan—though his Chelsea-fueled inspiration found on Blonde on Blonde also pushed the hotel further into the mainstream—later said that, when Warhol's film came out, "it was all over for the Chelsea Hotel. You might as well have burned it down."
16. Edie Sedgwick tried. Having accidentally set a previous apartment on fire when a cigarette fell out of her mouth and onto her bed, the Warhol Factory muse settled in at the Chelsea in 1967. But her lit cigarettes continued to spark concern (she was treated for burns after one fire), and management moved her to Room 105 directly above the lobby, so staffers could keep a closer eye on her.
Original Chelsea architect Philip Hubert had conflagration-prevention on his mind when he designed the three-foot-thick, cement-filled brick walls between rooms and had the beams between floors sheathed in fireproof plaster. With the help of subsequent structural improvements, numerous fires over the course of a century never caused widespread damage.
Dreaming Walls is now in theaters and on VOD.