The Chelsea Hotel

0:01Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:11Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. The super cool edition. Another edition in our ongoing New York saga to explain every single building or theme or trend in the entire city of New York. I feel like these are always me, so I'm sorry if I'm foisting these. Well, you love New York. I do. You know, the t-shirt told me to. That's right. Oh, I thought it was I heart New York. Is that what that means? Yeah. I get it now. But it's I heart New York. It didn't say you heart New York. I took it all wrong. But now I love that city, so I want to know more about it.

0:57It is a very cool city, and this is a cool place in the city's history for a long part of the city's history, actually. The Chelsea Hotel, which, little known fact, is actually supposed to be called the Hotel Chelsea. And I could not find who first turned it around because surely it was a poet or a singer or something, a writer. but at some point it got basically transversed even though the official name is and always has been since it was a hotel the hotel chelsea yeah it can be a little confusing uh same place though so uh don't sweat it so you can say either one but wait wait wait you want to talk confusing there's a marriott renaissance chelsea hotel oh god in the same neighborhood I mean, I could see myself accidentally booking that and being like, this place is a little more put together than I expected.

1:54Yeah. I mean, Chelsea is a neighborhood and every hotel in there is a Hotel Chelsea. Yeah. Or a Chelsea hotel, rather. I love Chelsea. I think that is one of my favorite neighborhoods in New York, if not my favorite. We stayed there a bunch of times when we went and visited New York. In Chelsea? Yeah, I like it as well. And I have stayed at the Hotel Chelsea a couple of times. I have, too. But yeah. But that actually answers a question that I had. I was trying to figure out where you came up with this as a topic. I would have guessed the Taylor Swift song, The Tortured Poets Department. OK. Because she mentions it in there.

2:35That's I guess not where that's not what inspired you to do this. No. Bob Dylan, if anybody. I got you. No, I mean, from staying there semi-recently, and that's the great thing about our job. I was like, yeah, I wish I knew a little bit more about this place. And here we are. Yeah. What did you think of it? The hotel? Yeah. Well, you know, as you'll learn, if you don't know, the Chelsea Hotel was renovated over the course of many, many, many years after being closed for those renovations. We'll get into all the ins and outs of that. But I thought that it was a top-notch renovation that, from what I've read, even though it's a fancy pants place now, everything I've read says that they did a very tasteful job.

3:21In fact, let me read, in fact, so I'm not just talking out of my butt. But one of the people in the New Yorker or something that wrote about it said it presents itself subtly and doesn't scream. I've changed due largely to the fact that the building was landmarked in 1977. So many elements such as its facade and famous stairwell cannot be changed in accordance with this landmark status. Current owners instead have worked with it and around its physical history and the enhancements are fitting. Nice. 158 rooms in 15 room categories from 200 square feet to 1700 square feet. And there you go. Well, yeah.

4:05And that's great that they did a good job with it because people all the way back to the 1940s with Edgar Lee Masters, the poet author of Spoon River Anthology, who lived there for a while, was worried about the gist of the Chelsea Hotel being stripped away by new owners. And it's changed hands a few times, but it's also stayed in really capable hands for decades. And those capable hands, as we'll see, helped give the Chelsea Hotel its own, like, its very famous vibe. Yeah. And I should also say, too, that a lot of people, I'm sure, think it's an abomination. And a lot of times these are the same people that were like, you know, Times Square was better or New York was better when it was a dirtbag city crumbling.

4:53And you were as likely to get mugged walking the streets or spray painted on if you stood still for too long as anything else. Yeah. So based on what we'll learn about what went on in the Chelsea Hotel, I think it's very telling how dangerous New York was at the time that almost to a person when they interviewed residents years later, they say they felt safe in the Chelsea Hotel. And the Chelsea Hotel was as crazy as a place could get. And yet it just goes to show you how much more dangerous it was outside of the Chelsea Hotel in New York at the time. Yeah, it seemed to have a very familial quality to it.

5:32And for good reason. So let's jump back to the beginning when it was built. First of all, it's right there at West 23rd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood. And it started in 1884 as the Chelsea Association Building. Nuts and bolts. It is a 12-story building. It was one of the taller buildings in New York at the time. It is Victorian Gothic. It is a beautiful, gorgeous building if you look at it from across the street. It's just one of New York's greatest landmarks designed by architect Philip. Is it Hubert or Hubert? I'm going to say Hubert. That's what I would say. All right. We'll go with that.

6:09And Hubert designed it on the philosophy of a French philosopher that he was a fan of named Charles. What is it? I think Fourier. Fourier, who is a utopian socialist and kind of thought this concept of a co-op of a community should work in co-ops called phalanxes. And that's what the Chelsea started out as was one of the first housing co-ops in New York City, where if you live in a co-op, then you own a share of that building along with all the other owners. And you also are responsible for the monies that help maintain and keep up that building. Yeah. It's all fun and games until you need a new roof.

6:47Yeah, exactly.

7:17electricians, if there was such a thing at the time, some of the plumbers, some of the carpenters, like they had shares. They were able to live in this co-op because there was room made for them. And there was also room made for artists and musicians and writers. And the point was to for everybody to kind of rely on one another. So if you needed plumbing help, you could pay your plumber in, you know, a painting or something like that, if your plumber would accept it. Everybody was meant to depend on everyone else and be kind of self-sufficient as a unit. Yeah. Not so big into abstract, but yeah, sure.

7:56I guess. Are you going places? Right. When are you going to die? Yeah, exactly. There are also in that very first iteration, and this is very key, you mentioned artists, but there were the top floor had 15 artist studios up there. And that really kind of carried on throughout the history of the Chelsea until most recently. That version of the Chelsea was around for about 21 years. It went bankrupt in 1905. Some of those residents stuck around. And then the rest became a hotel. And the Chelsea for decades functioned as a place where you could stay there as a hotel. You could stay there for a month.

8:37You could stay there for a week, like weekly and monthly rates. or you could be a resident and live there. It's a very unique situation. Yeah. And so the rooms also apparently were fairly cheap, especially for a luxury place, a luxury building. So if you were an up-and-coming or starving artist, you could still probably afford a place there. And because it was created to house artists and talent of all different kinds, it was automatically attractive. It just kind of became a place where art was created, not just a place where artists could live. There was a longtime Chelsea resident named Harry Smith, who I saw described as the archetypal bohemian trickster figure.

9:22And he's just Chelsea Hotel through and through from what I could tell. He said that the hotel exuded atmospheric vibrations that attracted artists and also helped produce great art. So like the building itself and the vibe that was in it led to better art than maybe would have otherwise been produced, at least according to Harry Smith, who was a trickster, apparently. So he might have been lying. And also, you know, the human brain works in funny ways. And once a place and gets a reputation as that, you go in there and that in itself, you may think you're being inspired just by being there. And that ends up inspiring you.

9:59You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think some people, though, I'm not going to name names, but I think over time, some artists who stayed there have wanted to kind of capture what that hotel does and maybe bit off a little more than they could chew. I think I know who you're talking about. I think you should second have a second thought or two if you're like, I'm going to make an ode to the Chelsea Hotel where there's a song, a movie. It doesn't matter. I know exactly what you're talking about. We're not talking about O. Henry, though, who stayed there a lot or Mark Twain, who stayed there a lot.

10:30or Sarah Bernhardt, who stayed there when she came to New York to perform. Those were all like frequent guests in those early years. There were artists, you know, very famous artists at the time, occupying those artist studios on the top floor. From the very beginning, they even held some Titanic survivors in 1912. That's where they went when they were brought in, shivering in the cold. Yeah, which is pretty cool that they opened their doors to them. I'm sure other hotels did too, but I thought that was neat. And we should say these artists that were staying here, O. Henry was hiding from creditors when he stayed there.

11:11John French Sloan, he was a member of the Ashcan School of Art, which made its name by showing some of the grittier, more dismal side of New York life, which is totally contrary to the zeitgeist. And so the artists were avant-garde basically throughout the entire history of the Chelsea Hotel. The artists working there were like the vanguard of the avant-garde. Yeah, like bohemian. You'll hear those words thrown out a lot when the Chelsea Hotel is described or its tenancy over the years. They were Czechoslovakian to a person. Right. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Thomas Wolfe was a frequenter there.

11:55In fact, he died. He spent the last years of his life there in room 829, writing things like, you can't go home again. And he died very young, though, from tuberculosis at the age of 37 and was known to kind of, you know, pace the halls looking for inspiration or that next paragraph or sentence. Yeah, I saw that somebody said he ran out into the street one night at like 3 a.m. and shouted that he'd written 10 ,000 words in one day. That's great. That's pretty substantial. And Thomas Wolfe, also not to be confused with Tom Wolfe. No, no. He was an influence in his own right. He influenced the beats mainly through Jack Kerouac.

12:36He influenced the new journalists. So ironically, Thomas Wolfe influenced Tom Wolfe. Yeah. And in fact, there's a story that Fear and Loathing, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and at the Kentucky Derby, that Hunter Thompson took that from a Thomas Wolfe story. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's pretty cool. We still haven't done one on Hunter S. Thompson either. No, he might be undoable. Yeah. You know how, remember the time we did that live show, it was the worst idea where we did how humor works. And we realized partway through in front of a live audience that explaining humor is like the least funny thing you can do.

13:16I don't remember that. Was that like a tour show or was that like for a. It was a pod fest. Was it really? Yeah. In LA. Years back. I blocked that one out. Yeah. I don't remember anything about it either. So you mentioned a lot of people have done their odes to the hotel, whether it's movies or songs or whatever. Perhaps the first one was a guy named Edgar Lee Masters, lived there from 31 to 44, and wrote a poem called The Hotel Chelsea. So he kind of got the ball rolling. Yeah, and he's the guy I was saying earlier, he wrote Spoon River Anthology that was worried about it losing its vibe. Well, let's read this first couple of lines then.

13:59And Anita, don't know who that is, but he's writing it to Anita. Soon this Chelsea Hotel will vanish before the city's merchant greed. Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead, more lofty walls will swell. Yeah. There you have it. Yeah. So this was the 40s. I'm guessing this was 1943 when it changed hands, I think, for the first or second time and was finally turned into the Hotel Chelsea. but he had very little to worry about because it got even more avant-garde after that. Yeah, you know, it's kind of had its ups and downs as far as how nice it was, I guess. It fell in pretty hard times after World War II, but it was always, you know, Dave described it as gruff but lovable.

14:46I mean, it never lost that charm, it seems like, even at its diviest. Dylan Thomas, the famous author, was a heavy drinker, as I think everyone knows. He drank himself to death there at the Chelsea in 1953. And they have a plaque. They don't have plaques for everybody, but there's a Dylan Thomas plaque. Dylan Thomas lived and rode at the Chelsea Hotel. And from here, he sailed out to die. Yeah, I read that on the day that he fell into a coma that eventually he died from. He said, I've had 18 straight whiskeys. I think that's the record. It's got to be. Yeah. So, yeah, Dylan Thomas was one of the ones whose death really kind of, I don't quite know how to put it, but there's certain aspects of the Chelsea Hotel and tragic figures dying in it is part of that.

15:40That's an aspect of it in and of itself. And Dylan Thomas kind of set the tone for that, right? Yeah. Immortalized, maybe? Sure. So he helped make the Chelsea Hotel famous in that respect by dying as a tragic figure there. Um, other people are just kind of famous and because they stayed in the Chelsea hotel, it kind of gives it a little more props like Jackson Pollock. Um, he lived there for a little while, little known fact, the CIA paid his rent. Um, no, I'm kidding. Virgil. Have you ever heard the theory that the, that the CIA was behind the abstract expressionist movements to make the United States seem more intellectual to the Soviets?

16:20No, but that makes that joke a very deep cut. So I don't even feel bad this time. Okay. For falling for it. So there are other people, too, that you may not have heard of that I hadn't heard of that were longtime residents that really kind of gave it like legitimacy. There was a music critic and composer named Virgil Thompson, who was apparently just incredibly prolific. He lived there for 50 years and died in room 920. Larry Rivers, who's considered the godfather of pop art. He lived there for about a decade. And when you put all this together and then also bring in tourists, because don't forget, this is a hotel that some people are living in for decades.

17:02But there's also people coming and going. And then you also throw in rich people who are basically just trying to hang out with avant-garde artists, even though they have no artistic talent themselves. It's just the crowd they want to hang with. You put all these people together and you've got like who you would see if you went into the Chelsea Hotel. Yeah, exactly. All right. We should take a break. And we'll come back and talk about David and Stanley Bard right after this.

17:47Who's the stuff you should know? Okay, so I said earlier that the Chelsea Hotel was incapable hands for decades. And those hands were initially David Bard and then after that his son Stanley Bard. And between the two of them, they took Philip Hubert's vision of the socialist utopia, but really the really artsy part of it, and just went to town. I saw it described as Stanley curated who lived in the Chelsea Hotel. It wasn't like, hey, I've got some money. I want to live here. You basically had to be vouched for by another avant-garde artist that probably already lived there. That was a good way to get in.

18:35Yeah, and I found this funny little fact that, you know, how little things can change history. David, in 1943, the elder Bard, he got together with some other investors to buy the hotel out of foreclosure. And the reason he did that is because he was a furrier who was allergic to fur and couldn't take it anymore. So the reason the Chelsea Hotel, one of the reasons that it kind of stayed that thing is because when David Bard took the reins in 1943, he kept that spirit alive. with the artist and like taking a painting in lieu of rent. Like had it gone to just some money hungry, greedy people, uh, it may have completely changed in 1943 and we wouldn't even be talking about it today.

19:21So had he not been a furry or allergic to fur, it may have been a completely different scene there, but, uh, he ran the hotel until he died in 64. And like you said, Stanley, his son, took over. And Stanley Bard was great. He was, I've got a pretty fun, like, apparently there was never any, like, problem he couldn't handle. He was known for being able to handle, like, whatever weirdness was going on there at the time. And Arthur Miller, when he was divorced from Marilyn Monroe, lived there for a period of years and wrote a lot about the Chelsea the hotel. And here's one good example about Stanley Bard.

19:59Arthur Miller called down after being so frustrated with how disgusting his carpet was, said, for Christ's sake, Stanley, don't you have a vacuum cleaner in the house? And he said, of course, we have lots of them. He said, well, why aren't they ever used? He said, they're not used? Stanley, you know, GD well that you don't use them. I've never heard such a thing. Why don't they use them? Well, you're asking me why they don't use them? Well, you're the one who brought it up. look Stanley just get a vacuum cleaner up here and let's just forget this conversation please fine how are you otherwise truthfully there is no otherwise all I am is a man waiting desperately for a vacuum cleaner and then Arthur Miller said and then he would laugh grateful for another happy tenant and that was like nothing was like uh ever wrong right at the Chelsea people were dying and being wheeled out of there and overdoses and he would make jokes that like no No, the cops were here because they lived there.

20:50And the body bags and the gurneys are just props. Yeah. So apparently Milos Forman, a true bohemian, he lived at the Chelsea from, I think, for the early 70s, about the first half of the 70s. And he asked Stanley once if anyone had ever died, I believe, to basically get him to admit. Yeah, yeah. Because there were a lot of deaths, whether it was by suicide, murder, mattress fires, overdoses. Yeah. And it was just well known that there were a lot of deaths that happened in the Chelsea Hotel. So Milos Forman asked Stanley once if he could think of anybody who ever died there. And he could only come up with one person.

21:35And he was a painter named Alfeus Cole. That's funny. He died in 1988, the oldest man in the world at 112. He died at the Chelsea Hotel. And that's the one person that Stanley could think of in the entire time that he was running the Chelsea Hotel. Yeah. And Stanley ran it for 40 years after his dad died. But like I said, his dad had the same attitude. They asked David, the elder bard, why he didn't ever evict a tenant who apparently was playing the drums and everyone was complaining and it was even driving him nuts. And his answer was, I like people. Yeah. Yeah. It was cool. Like you could get away with from what I saw.

22:13You could get away with basically anything up to murder, essentially. And Stanley would put up with it because that was the that was the rhythm that his father had kind of laid out. And if you want to cultivate an avant garde artist colony in the middle of New York, you're going to have to do that or else just give up because it's not going to work otherwise. Yeah. I got to read this other Arthur Miller quote. It's pretty good, too. He said the Chelsea, and this is, by the way, from the Chelsea Affect, A-F-F-E-C-T, about the Bards. He said the Chelsea, whatever else it was, was a house of infinite toleration.

22:52Yeah. This was the Bards' genius, I thought, to have achieved an operating chaos, which at the same time could be home to people who are not crazy. Yeah. Which I don't know who those people were. Yeah. I saw Mad as a Hatter used more times in the oral history of the Chelsea Hotel than I ever have anywhere else. Yeah. Just about everybody there. Yeah. Yeah. So my favorite Arthur Miller quote, by the way, is these pretzels are making me thirsty. It's a great one. Yeah, so let's jump into the 60s and 70s, because that's when the Chelsea seemed like it had some of its most notable events and residents, even if they were part time.

23:35My my favorite guy, Bob Dylan, stayed at the Chelsea, stayed in room 211 for about three years, you know, off and on because he was going up to Woodstock as well. But 61 to 64 is when he was hanging out with Ginsburg and doing his thing. He wrote most of, if not all of, Blonde on Blonde, which is his seventh album. And very specifically in the song Sarah, which was about his wife, his first wife, Sarah, that he married in 65. There's a great line in that song. Storms are brewing in your eyes? No, different Sarah. Oh, okay. This one is a very scathing, tough song. Bob Dylan was the champion of the anti-love song, and this is kind of one of them.

24:15But he said he writes about staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writing a sad-eyed lady of the lowlands for you. So he references another song on the same album that he wrote. Yeah, it's a song to his ex-wife. And he said, basically, I remember staying up for days, writing sad-eyed lady of the lowlands for you. Yeah. And no time is a good time for goodbye. Have you seen the Dylan movie? Do you care about that at all? No. Yeah, gotcha. So, but yeah, that was pretty seminal. I mean, that's one of his biggest albums, right? And I saw that at the time, too, that Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol went basically head to head over Edie Sedgwick, who also stayed at the Chelsea Hotel.

25:02And apparently that was the end of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick's red hot. I don't know what you'd call it. Not a romance. Just interaction. Relationship. Sure. We'll just go with that. But it was something other than that. And it lasted less than a year. But apparently Andy Warhol was so jealous that Edie Sedgwick had become totally obsessed with Bob Dylan, who may or may not have returned her advances. It just depends on who you ask. Bob Dylan says no. But Andy Warhol lost because Bob Dylan was at the time basically the biggest person in alternative culture, the counterculture at the time, even more than Andy Warhol was.

25:51He was just huge. And it's kind of difficult to overstate what a big deal this very big person was doing living and working in the Chelsea Hotel, like what it did for the Chelsea Hotel's reputation. Yeah, for sure. And it's also mind blowing to know while Bob Dylan's up there in room 211, literally typing out one of the seminal albums of all time. At the same time, Arthur C. Clark is adapting the screenplay for 2001, A Space Odyssey on a different floor in a different room. So like these kind of creative, you know, and Andy Warhol is in there shooting parts of Chelsea Girls. Like stuff was really, really happening.

26:34It didn't earn its reputation. Just it wasn't overblown at all, you know. Right. No. Another really famous thing that happened around that time was from Edie Sedgwick. She set her mattress on fire. Yeah. On purpose, I think. Was it on purpose? Because this was not her first apartment fire. Yeah. I think it was on purpose. Okay. So it's possible this is a very turbulent time for her. She could have been heartbroken over Bob Dylan. She could have been upset. Andy Warhol had turned his back on her. I know the previous apartment fire in a different building was because she had shot up a speed ball and the cigarette fell out of her mouth and onto her mattress and set her house on fire.

27:16That's kind of on purpose, too. I guess so. Yeah. But that kind of leads me to something. there's something that just doesn't show up in the histories i mean here there it kind of comes up but i think it's really understated the effect that it had on the community that developed in the chelsea hotel from the entire time that the building was open and that is drugs drugs drugs drugs drugs drugs like so everybody from sarah bernhardt the french actress to bob dylan and beyond. I wouldn't put it beyond Ethan Hawke. He lived there for a while. Yeah. So, I mean, the club kids, like with the capital C and the capital K in the 80s and 90s, like some of them lived there and they were definitely doing drugs there.