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Today, Architectural Digest checks into New York City’s most infamous hotel. The newly restored Hotel Chelsea is an iconic landmark that once housed Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Andy Warhol, Sid Vicious, and generations of artists, writers, and musicians. Discover how owner Sean MacPherson reimagined this 1880s Victorian Gothic Revival masterpiece while preserving its history and rebellious creative spirit.
Chelsea Hotel Archival Photos: Tod Seelie
Chelsea Hotel Archival Photos: Tod Seelie
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00:02The Hotel Chelsea is a combination of the Plaza Hotel and a Greyhound bus station.
00:08It captures the glamour of Hotel Chelsea.
00:12It has a history of being a little shady like a Greyhound bus station.
00:18Welcome to Hotel Chelsea.
00:23When the building was designed in the 1880s, it was designed to be a real sort of co-op
00:30to have people coming and going and cross-pollinating with different types of ideas.
00:35When we acquired Hotel Chelsea, it had already been under construction for several years.
00:40It was torn apart and it was in far worse shape than even five years prior to that.
00:46We also were very careful to try not to rip out the existing crown moldings,
00:51existing marble floors, existing historic staircase,
00:55and it felt like an archaeological dig where we had to gain information
00:58and rework everything without destroying it.
01:07We're in the lobby here and there's always a lot of people coming and going.
01:10It's one of the things I really like.
01:12In this particular room, there's layers of history here,
01:15so I don't know if this fireplace was necessarily here in 1884,
01:18but it's been here since at least 1920.
01:20But the marble floor was existing, the marble wainscoting's existing.
01:26All of that is really original.
01:28Most of the furniture is new because there really wasn't any furniture left here
01:32that was worth salvaging, but the core frame that everything is in is original.
01:38And because of the kind of eclectic nature of the guests over the years,
01:44it feels like everywhere you look at Chelsea there's a story,
01:48and I've learned more and more of the stories over time,
01:50and they're all sort of spectacular.
01:53For the last 30, 40 years, different people stayed here,
01:57and some of them traded art for rooms, some of them gave art,
02:01some of the art was purchased, but there was an enormous collection of art
02:04that's been accumulated over the years from people who had stayed here.
02:08I always liked the barter system.
02:10I just thought it's incredibly cool, so we've tried to maintain it.
02:14We recently had a painter, Oliver Clegg, stay here,
02:18and we traded paintings for rooms.
02:20We're just trying to sort of maintain the spirit of the hotel.
02:24We have so many people who help keep the property alive.
02:26My name is William Benton, and I am doorman, historian, and tour guide here at the historic Chelsea Hotel.
02:33The first time I came to the Chelsea Hotel, I was 18.
02:37It intersected with all of my interests growing up in rural Oklahoma,
02:41film, literature, music, everything, so I came here with a degree of expectations,
02:47and it met every one of them.
02:49My recollection is half the doors were open, and people freely went in and out of each other's rooms,
02:54and wanted to know who you were and what you were working on.
02:57The hallways themselves were so iconic, and the doorway structures that I'd seen in movies.
03:03It literally felt like entering another world to come here.
03:06Stanley, when he came on as general manager in the 60s,
03:09it was the family business, and it became his life's mission and ambition
03:13to not only maintain the legacy of this place, but to build upon it.
03:18It has a personality of its own.
03:20The creative clientele has a personality that we cater to.
03:24It's interesting, and the people are beautiful.
03:26A question I'm often asked is if there's sort of a quintessential Chelsea character if I had to pick one.
03:32Patti Smith, in her book, Just Kids, brings people to me three to one over everything else.
03:38I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan, and to know that behind a certain door was where he would pen songs
03:43that inspired me.
03:44Obviously, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin's infamous night together.
03:48Leonard Cohen would often tell her about his meeting Janis Joplin on the elevator,
03:52and he had asked her if she was looking for anyone in particular, and she said,
03:56Kris Kristofferson.
03:57And he said, today's your lucky day. I'm Kris Kristofferson.
04:00He said that she responded, I thought you would be taller.
04:03And then they ended up spending the night together, which resulted in the song Chelsea Hotel No. 2 that he
04:09would go on to write.
04:10People like Thomas Wolfe and Arthur Miller, they came here, the statement was they were here to work.
04:15And a huge part of that is just talking to other artists, sharing your ideas and inspiring each other.
04:21The folk movement, which was hugely inspired by Harry Smith's compilation, to the Beats who were looking to the writers
04:28before them.
04:29And then you've got the Warhol universe showing up and, to some degree, being a driving force around here in
04:36their era.
04:36On and on, it's almost as if some generations beckon in the next.
04:41When the hotel closed, it was as good as gone.
04:44You know, there's a bad habit in major cities, and in New York in particular, where they sanitize our history
04:50and what made and makes this city great.
04:53For it to be back in any incarnation, especially this, was a huge surprise and such a positive one.
05:01In particular, the Chelsea Hotel, where there's nothing like it, it's really been a crossroads for the world in terms
05:07of its inspiring of people,
05:10and its gathering of really, in my eyes and estimation, very important people who drive the culture in a lot
05:16of ways.
05:17So to have this history that made people like myself and plenty others who they are, and to still have
05:24it is, I believe, of great importance.
05:27The hotel seems to have a funny way of sucking you in. It's the closest I get to a sort
05:32of a paranormal experience.
05:34Well, we have some very infamous ghosts, as far as ghost stories go.
05:40A common question when I give people tours is what rooms and what spaces of the hotel are haunted.
05:46I always say this floor is haunted because there's a photo of my ex-girlfriend back there.
05:51It's such a dumb joke.
05:55It is funny, just in the few years of our reopening, people tell me that, you know, they felt someone
06:01walk by them in their room or the door mysteriously closed.
06:05And then, inevitably, I get asked for my experiences, and I'm sad to say that I've been coming here since
06:11the previous century, and I haven't seen or felt anything.
06:15But I'm here all the time now, it seems like, and I go home and I sleep and dream that
06:20I'm here, so I fear that I'm the extent of my own haunting now.
06:26This is one of the most storied hotels in New York City.
06:30A hotel that maybe had high-profile, wealthy people, but these were always kind of high-profile, notorious artists, etc.,
06:41and some scoundrels and some outlaws.
06:44A little bit like an Oliver Stone movie.
06:47It's hard to distinguish between fact and fiction, at what point the stories were embellished or what have you, but
06:52they all feel very true to me.
06:54But Bob Dylan most definitely lived in this hotel for a period of time and most definitely wrote music while
06:59he was living here.
07:00And from what I've been told, Bob Dylan lived actually in this room, and he wrote Sarah in this room.
07:05I think probably the most frequently requested room is the Nancy and Sid Vicious room, which is, you know, ultimately
07:12quite a sad story.
07:13It was during the Sex Pistols era, and Nancy was found dead, and allegedly he had murdered her here at
07:21the hotel.
07:21They definitely took her dead body out of the hotel, and then he died of a drug overdose before he
07:26was tried.
07:27So it was never proven with certainty precisely what happened.
07:31This is one of our smaller rooms. Probably Bob Dylan was on a great budget at that point in his
07:37life.
07:37On top of the building, there were seven large north-facing units that have 15-foot ceilings and get incredible
07:43northern light.
07:45And they're what we call the artist lofts, and they're really kind of special.
07:48What happened, because people lived here for so long and they were permanent residents, maybe someone would be living in
07:54one unit,
07:54and then the neighbor would move out, and then they would just build into the unit next door and just
07:59sort of colonize a little space.
08:01So it's kind of fun to see how the rooms just vary from room to room to room.
08:06But we wanted to really work hard to elevate the hotel and elevate the design and have it feel clean.
08:12But we wanted to try to avoid it feeling corporate.
08:15And so the design general intention was kind of rich, bohemian, that sort of quality.
08:21So we have these Chinese Art Deco rugs from the 30s.
08:24We have these faded velvet curtains, which we had made, which are sort of supposed to feel like faded blue
08:29jeans behind them.
08:30We have the bullet hole shears, which are supposed to sort of communicate some notion of punk rock.
08:35Almost every room has a balcony.
08:37And from what I can see online, it feels like almost every famous person who ever checked into this hotel
08:42took off all their clothes, stood on the balcony naked, and took a picture of themselves.
08:47Hotel Chelsea has always felt other, like it lives in a parallel universe.
08:51And that kind of always has, and I hope that it always will.
08:54And so in working the design, I really deliberately tried not to look at any visual reference
08:59of any really contemporary, for that matter, even historic buildings.
09:02I just want it to feel like it's just slightly in its own world.
09:14El Coyote opened in 1930, and historically, it's been the only restaurant in Hotel Chelsea.
09:20So there's a lot of stories, whether it's Patti Smith and Just Kids talking about,
09:24or photographs of Andy Warhol coming here.
09:26But this was sort of the watering hole for the entire hotel.
09:30We have various historic pieces here.
09:33We used some historic art and some of the historic tchotchkes.
09:36We took one of the old menus and sort of obscured it behind the current menu.
09:39Just again, the sort of layers of history, layers upon layers.
09:43The partition is original.
09:45The mural is original.
09:46And interestingly, there was a linoleum floor in here, which I peeled up and found this original marble mosaic.
09:53So the marble mosaic is new to this iteration of El Coyote, but it was the original floor.
09:59I also tore down the old ceiling and discovered this beautiful ceiling underneath, which I left intact.
10:05It's all sort of crumbling, and I really like that quality.
10:08The bar is original.
10:10The bar has cigarette burns on it, probably from Dylan Thomas, et cetera.
10:13And I like that kind of feeling of, one, the history, but also the time when people actually smoke cigarettes
10:19at a bar and let them burn the bar top.
10:22These particular lighting fixtures we bought vintage.
10:25These are actually Mexican by this craftsman named Fedders.
10:29I just really like them, and I like the feeling of them.
10:31So I collected some through this restaurant.
10:33To me, it feels pretty close to how it felt the first time when I came here in the 90s.
10:38And it just feels like a timeless space.
10:41It feels like stepping back into some past that maybe you imagined existed but had never been part of.
10:48This is the original restaurant that had always been in the hotel, but we wanted to have a restaurant that
10:54could have breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
10:56And it wasn't just Spanish food, so we opened up Cafe Chelsea in what was formerly a bait and tackle
11:01shop.
11:02The idea of that is just a classic French brasserie that serves around the clock.
11:07Being from 1884, there were two places for people to go here originally.
11:13There was the men's dining room and the ladies' tea room.
11:16The men's dining room was sort of torn out at some point.
11:20But the ladies' tea room has always been there and has got this hand-painted fresco on the ceiling.
11:25And so we just restored that room and kept it as the ladies' tea room.
11:28The lobby bar is in a zone behind the front desk that has these beautiful high ceilings and a backyard
11:35and a garden.
11:36And it had been used as storage for the last several decades.
11:40So we slowly pulled out all the boxes and dusted it off.
11:43We had this incredible space.
11:44And so we built it to be just a grand lobby bar.
11:48The one thing about this hotel, it was built by a French architect.
11:50It has these incredible volumes.
11:52And as much as it was run down, it always had these great bones of something quite regal.
11:58And so the idea with the lobby bar was to try to honor that formality and that elegance.
12:04The crown molding was covered and there was a frieze below that.
12:06And when we uncovered everything, some of it remained and some of it was missing.
12:10We recast it and replaced it, restored it all back to the original.
12:14One of the things that I really like about our lobby bar is it caters to both hotel guests and
12:18locals.
12:18And I've always really liked the mixing of all this sort of stuff.
12:21Speaking of mixing, it's got incredibly well-mixed drinks all curated by our director of bars, Brian Evans.
12:37This is the 100th universe. Cheers.
12:40Hi, I'm Brian Evans and I'm the director of bars for Hotel Chelsea.
12:44Here we have the lobby bar that is sort of past meets present, inspired by a lot of the hotel
12:49guests throughout history.
12:50The cocktails all lean really classic but with kind of a modernist edge to them.
12:55These spaces and the cocktail menus and even the food menus hopefully encapsulate a bit of that history.
13:01You know, at the lobby bar we name all of our cocktails on the menu in reference to former guests
13:06or long-term residents.
13:07We have a cocktail called the Two Dylans, which actually is a fun whiskey sour with raspberry and curry leaf.
13:13The name is in reference to Bob Dylan, who lived here, as well as Dylan Thomas, the writer who lived
13:18here for a while.
13:19I've always been fascinated with Yi Sedgwick and how she pretty much lit her room on fire.
13:25You know, she, I guess, fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand and the room caught fire.
13:29Probably my favorite story of the history of this hotel.
13:33Most recently we opened Teruko, named after Teruko Yokoi, an artist who actually lived at the Hotel Chelsea.
13:40It's a basement Japanese restaurant that actually holds the largest Japanese whiskey selection in all of North America.
13:54We're here on the roof, which is now the terrace to the spa and the gym.
13:58The Chelsea roof was a garden. It was used by a lot of the residents of the hotel.
14:03Behind me is the gym, which has had a lot of lives. It was an infirmary for a period of
14:08time.
14:08It was occupied by the musician Jabriath. There's a documentary the BBC made in 1981.
14:14It shows great footage of Jabriath performing in his apartment, which was just up here on the roof, which is
14:19fantastic.
14:20And Warhol walking the halls and shooting the hotel.
14:24There's a pyramid at the very top of the pyramid that came from Shirley Clark in the 60s.
14:29Hotel Chelsea is a designated landmark. The space is so special and we wanted it to be open to the
14:35public.
14:35And it just seemed like the most natural thing to do is to put the gym inside of it so
14:39people could see it and experience it.
14:41We didn't want it to be sort of lost to a private room.
14:44With this thing of sort of trying to update the hotel, but not make it too modern.
14:49A lot of people would have put a roof bar up here, but we wanted it just to feel like
14:52a very comfortable place.
14:54It's been a residential and commercial building forever and just the spa seemed more appropriate.
15:10Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you soon.
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