Hotel Chelsea

Wired's Listening Post blogs about one of my favorite NYC haunts, the Hotel Chelsea.

I first stayed at the Chelsea on my virgin visit to the city, en route to Spain to study abroad for a year. My then boyfriend and I showed up with no hotel reservation, no list of affordable hotels and addresses, and not a single phone number. Naturally. So, we jumped in a cab at the airport and requested that the cab driver take us "somewhere affordable in Manhattan." After two attempts at some not-so-affordable hotels, he ended up dropping us at the Hotel Chelsea. We knew nothing about its history, we only knew that it looked like our kind of place. And it was. As we were staying for 5 days, we managed to work out a reasonable extended-stay rate, and were put in a large room overlooking the street. To this day, my favorite detail of the Chelsea is the crown moulding: although it was large and highly detailed in the antique style, you wouldn't have known it for the hundreds of layers of paint that had been lathered over the wood. If an ethnoarchaeologist were to conduct a study of the paint, surely the equally layered history of the Hotel's residents would emerge, providing an elaborate cross-section of beauty, blood dust, and betrayal.

After spending a few nights there, we came to learn of the Chelsea's famous residents and their histories, tragic or otherwise. More interesting than the ghosts of artists past, though, were the ghosts of artists present. Chimeric works of art were scattered haphazardly throughout the Hotel, and any amount of wandering and (slightly tremulous) corner-turning would always bring you upon some new and disconcerting discovery. Some of it was good. Some of it was not. But some of it still haunts me today, and I wonder what became of the artist whose works I passed every day along the wrought-iron staircase.

I recently revisited the Chelsea, bringing a friend and long-time resident of the city to the Hotel for her first time. And even though more than four years had passed since my initial encounter, I was still instantly transported into the time-warp that the place is, taken back into an undefinable era that was nevertheless unquestionably not this one. There is something about a building in which the light is always somewhat sinister and the ghosts are never quite silent that sends a chill up your spine on even the warmest summer day. But then again, that's exactly why you go there.