Inside the Chelsea Hotel: ‘It has always been a mirror of what is happening outside’

“The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe,” Patti Smith wrote in her memoir, Just Kids. “Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.”

New York’s Chelsea Hotel (properly, the Hotel Chelsea) is a Victorian Gothic landmark at 222 West 23rd Street which has incubated art like few other addresses. Dylan claimed to have written parts of his epic acid reverie on his future wife Sara Lownds, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, in its corridors in 1966, and Leonard Cohen sketched an assignation with fellow resident Janis Joplin, “giving me head in the unmade bed” in “Chelsea Hotel #2” (1974), later regretting his “indiscretion”. Arthur C Clarke worked on the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), sometimes chatting in a nearby laundromat with Arthur Miller, who wrote After the Fall (1964) during his six-year stay. Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls (1966) crystallised the legend when it was shot at the hotel, as his Superstars traded bitchy barbs between bouts of torpor, in a film whose three and half hours felt like living there.

“It’s the painters that always came here,” manager/co-owner Stanley Bard told Abel Ferrara in his 2008 documentary Chelsea on the Rocks, “because they were seeing that the managers here understood them, appreciated them and would do anything to help them in any way possible.” Residents sometimes offered Bard art in lieu of rent, as the unknown Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe did when they checked in in 1969. Paintings lined the stairwell, like a dazzling, multicoloured Escher sketch.

Belgian directors Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt spent two and a half years filming at the Chelsea for their new, Martin Scorsese-produced documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. They caught the end of a decade of renovation by successive property developers, following Bard’s bitter 2007 ousting. Instead of the bohemian sanctuary they expected, they discovered a place in transition: a building site, being broken and turned into a boutique hotel.

In the new Chelsea now busy being born, the last of the long-term, low-rent artist residents Bard had indulged wander the corridors like unquiet ghosts; hunched revenants refusing to leave. Dreaming Walls floats footage of Edie Sedgwick and Nico over the Chelsea’s tiles, as Ginsberg cries, “Holy, holy, holy!” down its stairs. But it is more interested in these remaining, embattled holdouts. “They’ve mostly been moved to huddle on the first floor,” van Elmbt explains, “which is not a nice way to treat people in a place where they’ve spent their whole lives as artists. They still pay protected rent contracts, but they’re made to seem like freaks, or lost souls.”

The three major documentaries on the Chelsea move from the confident, grimy pomp of Nigel Finch’s 1981 BBC Arena film Chelsea Hotel, with Bard blithely in charge, Warhol and William Burroughs suspiciously eyeing each other over lunch, Nico mordantly singing “Chelsea Girls” and young artists such as rock’s first openly gay major-label star Jobriath confidently continuing the hotel’s tradition, to Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, which recreates Nancy Spungen’s fatal last night there with Sid Vicious and sinks into its old underside of dealers, prostitutes and junkies.

Dreaming Walls is a strangely glorious epilogue to all that; a last, defiant stand. What’s left of the Chelsea is no longer about Dylan hammering his typewriter in an amphetamine frenzy, or other youthful highs by stars at their peak. The film instead documents the stubborn persistence of art and artists. “We went into the Chelsea with a glamorous idea of punks, young people and great creativity everywhere — but found only old people, still creating,” says van Elmbt.

There is much talk of ghosts and spirits in the film. Van Elmbt believes these veterans have been at the Chelsea so long, they’re sinking into its fabric. “Living in a place with an energy as strong as the Chelsea’s has a weight, and you become part of the walls and furniture sometimes.” Duverdier goes further. “Sometimes the Chelsea can seem like a tomb. They know that they will stay there until the end — they want to die there.”

I stayed at the Chelsea in 2006, the last full year of Bard’s reign. My room was like stepping back into a basic postwar New York apartment, with a kitchenette, and scaffolding to prevent masonry crumbling on to passers-by. “In the early Sixties truckers still took rooms without baths on the second floor,” Arthur Miller wrote, and that world remained. The value of staying in this world-famous hotel wasn’t in glamorous fixtures (though faded Victorian splendour remained in other rooms), but in this unaffectedly preserved, still present past. The art-bedecked stairwell couldn’t be seen by tourists from the ground floor, and there was no restaurant or bar (the adjacent El Quijote was a separate business till the new owners bought it in 2014). Moneymaking opportunities had been absent-mindedly overlooked, just as New York’s otherwise voracious art economy was inverted for Bard’s favoured residents, who created unencumbered by cold cash realities.

“The Chelsea has always been a mirror of what is happening outside,” van Elmbt says, “and now we are living in an ultra-capitalist society. What Stanley Bard did regarding rent and other things was super-transgressive, and now that freedom and transgression is disappearing. But the artists in the Chelsea continue to work without success’s spotlight. This film is about creation without the money function.”

The residents’ bohemian qualities seem, if anything, intensified by the renovations’ steam-hammer hostility to their presence. Maybe some have gone a little mad under the strain, becoming further marooned from regular society. Still, strippers and fellow residents model for a wire-sculptor, Skye Ferrante. The avant-garde dancer and choreographer Merle Lister, whose company performed at the Lincoln Center in the 1970s, now navigates the Chelsea in a wheelchair, but dances anyway. Bettina Grossman gained respect for her conceptual art and photography shortly before her death in 2021, aged 94. “[The Chelsea] spirit goes with me wherever I go,” she tells the directors. “It nourishes me.”

Duverdier and van Elmbt have been changed themselves by their years in the Chelsea. “The place is a magnet, full of energy,” Duverdier says. “We were just two young ladies from Europe, and we did this film. I think that’s also thanks to the Chelsea energy. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. You are taken by it.”

‘Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel’ is in UK cinemas from January 20