The Chelsea Hotel

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

Hey 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 addition 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. It 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 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. Yeah.
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. Oh, yeah? 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, because she mentions it in there. That'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, fancy pants place now, everything I've read says that they did a very tasteful job.
In 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. 158 rooms in 15-room categories from 200 square feet to 1,700 square feet.
And there you go. Well, yeah, and 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. And 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.
And 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. And 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.

Exactly. So Hubert actually followed Fourier's vision and turned the Chelsea into not just a co-op, but an attempted socialist utopian paradise where it wasn't just for the wealthy.
like that it was I think I don't know if you said or not it was one of the tallest buildings in New York at the time. So it was a very Tony address when the building opened.
And yet he set apartments aside for some of the people who had built the building, like some of the electricians, 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 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. I guess.
Are you going to places? Right. When are you going to die? Yeah, exactly.
They're also in that very first iteration, and this is very key, you mentioned artists, but 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, you 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. And 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. You 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 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, or Sarah Bernhardt, who stayed there when she came to New York to perform.
Those were all frequent guests in those early years. There were artists, very famous artists at the timeying the, those artist studios on the top floor.
Um, from the very beginning, uh, they even, um, held some Titanic survivors in 1912. That's where they went when they were, when they were brought in, shivering in the cold.
Yeah. Uh, which is pretty cool that they opened their doors to them.
I'm sure other hotels did too, but I thought that was neat. Yeah.
And we should artists that were staying here, O. Henry was hiding from creditors when he stayed there.
John 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.
And 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.
In 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. He influenced the new journalists.
So ironically, Thomas Wolfe influenced Tom Wolfe. Yeah.
And in fact, there's a story that Fear and Loathing from 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. 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.

I 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 L.A. years back.
I blocked that one out. Yeah, I don't remember anything about it either.
So you mentioned a lot of people have, you know, 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 being, about it losing its vibe. Well, let's read this first couple of lines then.
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. I mean, it never lost that charm, it seems like.
Yeah. 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 wrote 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. That'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.

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, he lived there for a little while. Little known fact, the CIA paid his rent.
Oh, really? No, I'm kidding. Have you ever heard the theory that the CIA was behind the abstract expressionist movements to make the United States seem more intellectual to the Soviets? No, 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, he'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, but 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.

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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. Yeah, 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.
So 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, um, I've got a pretty fun, like, apparently there was never any like a 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 Hotel. Here's one good example about Stanley Bard.
Arthur 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? 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,

Thank you. 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 ever wrong at the Chelsea. People were dying and being wheeled out of there and overdoses.
And he would make jokes that like, no, the cops were here because they live there. And 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,

overdose, 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. And 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.
You could get away with, from what I saw. You 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 is 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.
This was the Bards genius, I thought, to have achieved an operating chaos, which at the same time could be home to people who were not crazy. Yeah.
Which I don't know who those people were. Yeah.
I saw Matt 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.
My 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.
This one is very scathing, tough song. Bob Dylan was the champion of the anti-love, and this is kind of one of them.
But 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. And 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, like, basically the biggest person in, like, alternative culture, the counterculture at the time.
Like, even more than Andy Warhol was. Like, he 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 and 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. It 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 speedball and the cigarette fell out of her mouth and onto her mattress and set her house on fire. That'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 or 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 was 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.
Like it was just a really big part of the experience of living at the Chelsea Hotel. It was like essentially one of the muses that was walking around the halls of that building all the time.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, Gabby Hoffman, the actor, she was raised there from birth till she was 11 years old.
Her mom was Viva, who was another one of Warhol's superstars. And little Gabby Hoffman from Sleepless in Seattle, you know, she's a grown lady, you know know middle-aged woman now uh and has talked a lot about it um she loved living there but she you know she was stepping over people you know passed out with heroin needles in their arms and you know on her roller skates uh and just a you know kind of a crazy life but to her it was just like yeah just lived in this sort of legendary divy apartment building like there was a gazillion non-famous ones in new york this one just happened to be famous right um i did see where her mom viva eventually i don't think it was ever published but she wrote a book uh because writers always like very cheekily say that like gabby hoffman was sort of the chelsea hotel's answer to eloise uh the children's book and apparently her mom wrote a book called gabby at the Chelsea, but I don't think, I've tried to find out, I don't think it was ever released.
That's cute. I would love to see that.
Yeah. How about some more famous stuff that happened there, huh? Yeah, like liaisons, Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen.
That's a big one. Yeah.
He wrote about that in Chelsea Hotel No. 2, one of his songs, a very famous song.

So they were together from 68 to 70 when Janice died.

I don't know if they were like an item or if they just, you know, liked hanging out, if you know what I mean.

I think I know what you mean.

But regardless, they were just a famous couple from there.

Yeah, that's not the right word.

I'm having trouble pulling words out of the air. Another couple that you could probably call more of a couple was Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.
They moved into the Chelsea. They were totally broke at the time.
Patti Smith became like the poet of the punk scene. Robert Mapplethorpe famously became the devil incarnate with his photos.

Provocative pictures.

That's one way to put it, sure, of BDSM culture and gay culture in the 80s.

And like almost got the National Endowments for the Arts canceled.

Although I think it's unfair to say it was him.

Jesse Helms almost got the NEA canceled.

And it was Robert Mapplethorpe was just making art.

And Jesse Helms just did not think a bullwhip coming out of a man's rectum was art.

That's right.

I have that book.

I haven't read it yet.

It's on the shelf with a bunch of other rock and roll books that I have yet to get to.

The Jesse Helms story? No. Yeah with a bunch of other rock and roll books that i have yet to get to but the jesse home story no yeah exactly what a rock and roll story uh patty smith's book that she wrote about her time with maple thorpe uh i think it's called just kids uh that i'm looking forward to uh to getting into but um boy can i tell a quick patty smith bob dylan story is there's nothing to do with the chelsea hotel yeah well you know what i'm gonna say it does i'll say she told him here okay uh if you're a dylan fan you'll like this you can just check out for a second but on bob dylan's very famous rolling thunder tour uh that he took up in 75 76 some people look at that as like some Pete Dillon live performance.

Unbelievable stuff.

But he has a performance of his song ISIS, one of his great songs off the record Desire,

where it's just one of the great live performances of anyone ever is his performance on Rolling Thunder of ISIS. And he doesn't play the guitar, and he's just standing there, and he didn't do that a lot.

And Patti Smith is the one who encouraged him. He said, Bob, you should do ISIS without the guitar.
Um, and he's just standing there and he didn't do that a lot. And he, Patty Smith is the one who encouraged him.
He said, Bob, you should, you should do ISIS without the guitar. And he said, Patty, I don't know what to do with my hands.
And she said, make them into fists. So did he? Yeah.
Heck yeah, he did. Okay.
Uh, and Patty Smith wrote also about, um, the Chelsea a lot in, uh, the restaurant there. It's not officially part of it, but it's connected.
You can get to it through the hotel, uh, El Quixote, um, underwent a lot of renovations, um, to reopen. It was, uh, it was a pretty big dive of a place, uh, back then, but it was cheap food and it was Spanish food.
And so people ate there, even though apparently the food wasn't good. I saw it described, was it the paella could have been consistency of yesterday's oatmeal.
The taste of the sangria might be best described as purple. But before the Woodstock Music Festival, Patti Smith went to the Chelsea or was living there, I guess.
And she said, I walked into El Cajote's bar one afternoon in 1969 to find musicians everywhere sitting before tables laid with mounds of shrimp and green sauce, paella, pitchers of sangria and bottles of tequila. Jefferson Airplane was there.
So was Janis Joplin and her band. Jimi Hendrix sat by the door.
Like, can you book like just walking into a restaurant and seeing something like that happening? Incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You'd be like, I don't really care about any of these people.

No, I do.

I love Jimi Hendrix.

And clearly I love at least Jefferson Starship.

Right.

You were like, one day, you don't know it yet.

You're going to write a song called Sarah.

That's right.

And I spent at least one summer just listening to Janis Joplin's greatest hits

over and over again. So I could be

down with that scene, man.

Should we take a break? Yeah.

All right. We'll be right back and we'll

finish up on the Chelsea Hotel right after this. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.

PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns

so we could address them one by one.

That's terrifying.

That's fair.

Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year. Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines.
Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty. And today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.
I can't wait for you to hear this episode about their love story, about their relationship like you've never heard it before. I want to go back to the first time you ever met.
Well, thank you so much for this. One of the greatest.
Thank you. I'm Selena, but we're watching Disney here.
When you're a pop star like she is, and you're a huge entity, and people set up all these walls before, and then the first second you, like, disarmed everybody. By the way, congratulations on your engagement.
What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest.

He'll tell me anything that he's feeling and it made me feel like I could do the same. If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked.
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok.
you come across a video of a teenage girl

and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like, it was him? I was like, oh my God.
It was shocking. It was very shocking.
I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles.
And I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice.
They put out something on social media, so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody.
It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down their friend's killer.

This is their story. This is My Friend Daisy.

Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. all right we talked about people dying at the chelsea so we we should probably talk more specifically about this uh because it it seemed to happen a lot right yeah um there were people who jumped out of windows remember it was a 12-story building.
And this was nothing new. There's a rumor of a ghost of a woman who supposedly lived there and was an artist who was upset with herself and cut off her hand and then threw herself out the window.
This would have been in the first couple decades of the 20th century. But it didn't stop with her.
It just kept going and going and going. And then even if someone didn't die by suicide or wasn't murdered or their place wasn't

set on fire, just the day-to-day grimy grittiness of it, of heroin addicts like shooting up in the

bathrooms or sex workers like washing their underwear in the bathrooms, that was another

quote from the oral

history of all places that Vanity Fair had on the Chelsea Hotel. Like there was just a definite dark side to it, which is just kind of underscores what I was saying before that people were like, and I felt so safe there.
And it was like, what was it like outside of this building if this is what it was like inside, you know? Yeah, that's a good point. There was a very notorious death there, depending on who you ask.
Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, there in room 100. In October of 1978, we can't say for sure because he denied it to his last days, which was before he went to court.
He died of a heroin overdose before he was able to go to trial for that. But what we do know is that Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death there.
Yeah, there's a biographer, author named Phil Strongman or Strongman. I would call myself Phil Strongman if that were my name.
But he wrote a punk nonfiction book, I guess, called Pretty Vacant. And he points to Rocket's Red Glare, who was a bodyguard for the Sex Pistols at the time, who was the last person known to have seen Nancy Spungen alive.
And there was also supposedly a bunch of money, cash in the apartment that couldn't be accounted for after her body was discovered. So he makes a pretty good case.
Apparently also Rockets Red Glare was admitted to it later on to some people. So who knows? But I don't think it was Sid Vicious.
Yeah. I know Rockets Red Glare from a lot of those early Jim Jarmusch movies.
Interesting dude. Rufus Wainwright lived there in 2000 to work on a record.
And there's a pretty funny story there where he was he called down to the front desk and asked if they could send up a quart of milk. And apparently the bellman arrived with a tray full of just tons and tons of drugs because milk unbeknownst to Rufus was the code word at the Chelsea for drugs.
Yeah, because he was the only person in the history of the hotel who actually wanted milk at one point. And you mentioned Ethan Hawke, our, I was about to say our old friend.
We don't have nothing to do with him. I love Ethan Hawke.
I think he's a great, passionate, artistic dude, but he lived there, uh, for three years when he was sort of, um, I don't know, I think he was fully divorced, but was when he was with Uma Thurman, they were kind of on the rocks and he made the movie Chelsea Walls in 2001, which is a series of short films about a day in the life of people at the Chelsea Hotel. So, you know something about him? I've become more and more of a fan over the years.
I think he's really kind of grown into his talent. Yeah.
Yeah. I think he's, I like the guy a lot.
And I like his daughter and I like Uma. I think I'm a big fan of that family.
Yeah. Who's his daughter? Maya Hawk.
She's an actor. Oh, I don't know.
I'm not familiar. Up and coming.
She's on Stranger Things. It's probably what most people know her from these days.
Oh, okay. So what else, Chuck? And she looks just like Uma.
Oh, really? Yeah, it's really funny. I mean, a little bit of Ethan in there, but she's got Uma's mannerisms and voice.
It's pretty cool. Nice.
So you mentioned that the Chelsea Hotel underwent renovations for a long time, over a decade from what I saw. The whole thing started when Stanley Bard was forced out back in 2007 or 2008.
I saw both. Um, remember that his father, David Bard had purchased the Chelsea with two other families, two other men.
Well, their heirs were basically like, you are not, um, making money here. Like he was very, Stanley was very famous for accepting art in lieu of rent.
If you were hard, you know, down on your luck, uh, but you were an artist, like he would just, you know, look the other way for a few months. Like he was not running it like a business and he was very open about that.
So apparently the heirs of the other two owners were like, you need to get out. We have two thirds of a vote and you're out.
And that was when things just kind of, yeah, big bummer. Things just started to change because a few years after that, they sold it to some investors.
I think that was in 2011. They sold it for $80 million.
The investors came in, fired all of the staff because they were union and brought in non-union workers. They did away with basically everything that was cool and intangible about the place.
And they also took down all the art. Like one of the things Stanley did was hang art by the artists who'd lived there all throughout the place.
It was just laden with art. They took all of it off the walls, put it in storage, apparently some that wasn't Stanley's or that wasn't the hotel's too.
The Larry Rivers Foundation is suing to get one of his paintings back that they say was just on loan. And from that point on, it just became kind of ham fisted and not very pleasant for the people who live there in the Chelsea.
Yeah, it's very controversial renovation because, like you said, there are still people living there. Some of those residents held out and fought it for as long as they could.
Some other residents were mad at those residents because they were like, we're just living under construction because it's taking forever because you're fighting this. It's going to happen.
Just give up so we can at least get this finished and live a normal life again. So it really, you know, depends on your perspective.
There's a really, really good documentary that I highly recommend called Dreaming Walls from 2022, where they go inside a lot of these original residents' apartments, see what they're like. There are also some good books about this.
From what I found, as of now, I think there's about 40 of them still there, original residents in those apartments. And when you stay there, you're walking down the hall through your room and all the doors look the same.
And then you'll come across a door that's not the same. And that's an original resident.
Yeah. Which is pretty cool that they're still there.
They're also rent controlled, I believe, which is how they're able to still stay there. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, and this is one of those things where I really like staying there, but I feel like, man, I bet these people hate people like me that like staying here. Right.
Just walking around oligog. I know, and like, you know, with my nine-year-old daughter, who's not Gabby Hoffman.
Right. She's not on roller skates.
She's she's not an uncle buck i know so i have very mixed feelings about the whole thing about like if does staying there support that kind of action in general or well you know you bring that i thought that too um you me and i say there a couple of times over the years we did the most avant-garde thing you can do we stayed at the ch Chelsea Hotel when we went to see comedian Tom Rhodes at the Gotham Comedy Club next door. Oh, yeah, that's very close.
Yeah, he's super underground. But I mean, I totally get that feeling that you're talking about where it's just like, this was something and now is this like the dolled up version, like kind of the fake Disney-fied version of what it used to be and that leads me to a question that i had throughout researching this chuck where is whatever the chelsea hotel was now where is it i don't think it's in new york anymore i don't think it's something like that can survive in new york because it's just gotten so wealthy and wealthy and wealthy and wealthiness is not really, it doesn't really jive with what the Chelsea Hotel was in its heyday.
So, like, where is it? Is it somewhere else in the world? Is it in Kansas? Like, where did this go? I really want to know who's doing really interesting, cool work these days. Where can you find it? Or is it just not around? I know.
I'm with you. And also the notion of like, it's a pretty easy target, but like, you know, I bet the Holiday Inn Express and Times Square kicked out some residents for whatever building they took over.
You know, like, is there any hotel group on the earth that isn't gross and did things like that in these dense cities? Yeah. I mean, look what happened to San Francisco.
Like it lost a lot of its. Oh, yeah.
I don't want to say luster because it wasn't luster that that made it so charming, but it lost some of its jam. Yeah, for sure.
But, you know, El Quixote is awesome now. They've got some really good chefs that work there.
You know, big shout out to John Pacini. He's the general manager there.
He's a Stuff You Should Know listener. He's always been very kind to me.
So big shout out to him. And he's just he's done a great job.
And the paella is good now. And I've had some really great experiences in that restaurant.
And in that hotel, the lobby bar there is there is amazing like it's a truly great place to go have a drink and if you if you stay there you can get in um but if you don't stay there you can still go get a drink there I would recommend it um so I don't know it's it definitely makes me question things but like I said is is there a place in New York where original residents weren't screwed over in some way or another to make way for some new expensive thing? Oh, I mean, also not just like people living there. I mean, like the art, the artistic vibe that was there.
Where did that go? Because it's not like that stuff dies, you know? I know. I know.
And a lot of those 40 residents or some of them are still artists making art there. Yeah, for sure.
They just got to, I don't know if that documentary was accurate, but I think that the residents either aren't allowed to use the main entrance or maybe they just prefer not to. I could see either one, actually.
I really could too, actually. Well, that's it for the Chelsea Hotel.
We could keep going on and on and on. But I feel like this is a good place to stop, don't you? Yeah.
I mean, let's quickly mention that there were some very famous things auctioned off. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Good call. Some of the famous doors.
Bob Dylan's door was auctioned off. I think either Leonard Cohen or Janis Joplin's door was auctioned.
And that iconic sign, as best I can figure, was renovated,

but part of that renovation included replacing the letters,

and those original letters were sold off.

Cool. Thank you for figuring that out,

because I could not make heads or tails of how the sign was restored,

but then they auctioned off the sign.

Yeah, I think just pieces of the original, you know, you got a C on both sides and H and E on both sides. And, you know, I think you found even that they had them wired so you could put it in your loft and light it up.
Pretty awesome. Pretty cool.
Okay, well, that's it. That's it for Chelsea Hotel.
If you want to know more about the Chelsea Hotel, go check out the Chelsea Hotel. And since I said Chelsea Hotel three times, as was foretold in 2008, I've unlocked listener mail.
That's right. And to prevent another listener mail, yes, we know Naked Lunch was written there.
Thank you. Thank you, sir.
And a lot of other stuff was written there. You can't cover it all.
No. Hey, guys, this is about inner monologues, too, because I mentioned, aside from me thinking weird things when I'm falling asleep, I mentioned Emily's thumb spelling.
And it turns out a ton of people do stuff like that. And I told her, and she was just delighted to find out that she is in a club.
Hey, guys, after a decade, I finally have the inspiration to write. On the latest episode, Chuck mentioned Emily spells out words with her thumb while stressed I do something extremely similar Instead of tracing the letters, I spell them out In the sign language alphabet And there were all kinds of variations Some people air type Sometimes it's cursive Sometimes it's sign language, like it's really interesting I spell them out in sign language Alphabet, been doing it I was at least 11 and I've never heard of anyone else spelling out words while stressed.
I would love to know the reason, but I'm also just content to know that someone else has a similar eccentricity. Thanks for sharing such a lovely anecdote of what it means to love someone with all their little oddities and peccadillos.
One of my favorite words. It's the acceptance and joy in the mundane and extraordinary in life

that keeps me coming back every week for a new episode.

I'm a sandwich listener.

I'm sure you're going to get dozens of these emails

claiming to be Emily's long-lost finger-spelling twin,

but I had to write in because I've always wanted to.

Stay weird.

And Lauren Nieder, or Nieder, I'm not sure how you pronounce it,

you are in a larger club because we heard from a lot of you.

Yeah, that's really cool. I'm glad Emily's delighted.
Yeah. I'm delighted too.
Me too. Well, if you want to be like Lauren and write in and let us know that you're a part of a club too, well, we love to hear that kind of stuff.
You can send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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