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If the lawsuit of a woman who accuses Bob Dylan to abuse her in the Chelsea Hotel, and the career of the singer-songwriter is ended by the culture of cancellation, it would be a tremendous joke of fate. There, in one of his rooms, Dylan Thomas, the poet who inspired the stage name of the author of ‘Blowin’ in the wind ‘, died of an alcoholic coma.
The building, opened in 1884 as a kind of communal experiment inspired by the theories of Charles Fourier, and converted into a hotel in 1905, also hosted writers such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and William Burroughs. Also Jack Kerouac, who according to legend seduced Gore Vidal himself to
sleep with him on a rusty bed. But it was from the sixties that it acquired the status of an architectural pop icon.
In 1966, the actress Edie Sedgwick he insisted on sleeping in his room by the light of a chandelier. Although Leonard Cohen, another regular of the place, warned her of the danger of leaving there burning, she fell asleep with the candles lit and set fire to the room. That same year, Sedgwick suffered a nervous breakdown and moved to another hotel.
At the same time, singers like Nico, Joni Mitchell or the Jefferson Airplane group dedicated lyrics to the hotel, as did Cohen himself, who described in his song ‘Chelsea hotel # 2’ how Janis Joplin He gave her a fellatio in her suite, after convincing her that Kris Kristofferson was his idol during a brief meeting in the elevator: «I remember you well in the Chelsea hotel / you were talking so brave and so sweet / giving me head on the unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the street ” Years later, something similar to Milos Forman was about to happen to him: “A girl entered the elevator totally naked, but since I was left without knowing what to do, she left when she stopped at the next floor. I never saw her again.
The seventies were also busy years at the Chelsea Hotel. Shortly after the Sex PistolsIn ’78, Sid Vicious and his infamous girlfriend Nancy Spungen stayed at the hotel to get high on heroin day after day too. Shortly after settling there, Spungen was found dead, stabbed in room 100. The volcanic bassist pleaded not guilty to the crime, though police later located the murder weapon with his fingerprints. However, he escaped the trial, because he went to another neighborhood after injecting himself with a lethal overdose.
Of course, a lot of nice things happened there too. In 1961, the French artist Yves Klein There he wrote the ‘Chelsea Manifesto’, which said: “It is necessary to create and recreate a constant physical fluidity to receive the grace that allows a positive creativity that arises from emptiness.” In 1969, Robert Mapplethorpe took his first photographs with a Polaroid lent to him by artist Sandy Dealy. He had an exceptional muse, Patti Smith, with whom she was sharing room 1017, (‘famous for being the smallest in the hotel’), as the singer wrote in her memoirs. “It was a tremendous stroke of luck landing there … living in this damn eccentric hotel gave me a sense of security and a stellar upbringing,” said the punk godmother. Andy Warhol filmed there ‘Chelsea Girl’, The Factory’s first hit, Arthur C. Clarke wrote ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ in one of his rooms, and Arthur Miller he did the same with ‘After the Fall’. “It was a place where you could get high from the marijuana smoke in the elevators. It was the peak of surrealism, a place that did not belong to the United States, where there were no vacuum cleaners, no rules, and no shame. Madonna, who had resided there in the eighties, returned in 1992 to do a photo shoot for his book ‘Sex’. Another writer, Joseph O’Neill, lived in the hotel for six years and wrote his famous novel ‘Netherlands’, whose protagonist took refuge in the hotel after the 9/11 attacks. Three years after the book was published, the hotel closed, and it is still waiting to find an investment that will bring it back to life.
Own Bob Dylan, who lived for several seasons in room 211, found there the inspiration to compose two songs, ‘Sad-eyed Lady of Lowlands’ in 1966, and ‘Sarah’ in 1976, the latter dedicated to his wife and with a nod to the former : “Staying up for days in the Chelsea hotel / writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you” . But when the legal proceedings opened after the lawsuit that accuses him of drugging and raping a twelve-year-old girl there ends, perhaps another chapter will have to be added to the history of the Chelsea Hotel, the most murky of all.
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