Legends of the Chelsea Hotel

From Flophouse to Boutique: A Recent History of the Hotel Chelsea

The Chelsea Hotel is a much different place now than it was in the mid-1990s, when my girlfriend, Debbie Martin, and I moved in. Back then, the hallways were carpeted with worn linoleum squares in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern and illuminated by long, bare, flickering florescent tubes. The transient rooms were furnished with a mixture of cheap, broken-down, 1950s hotel furniture and odd, rickety antiques of an earlier era. Standards of cleanliness were on the order of a Bowery flophouse. (Good luck getting your sheets changed.) The place was, in other words, grimly beautiful: A seedier Bohemian vibe would be hard to imagine. (Read More)

About Legends of the Chelsea Hotel

From Ethan Hawke, Sid Vicious, and Patti Smith to Arthur Miller, William Burroughs, and Edie Sedgwick, renowned New York City blogger Ed Hamilton chronicles the past and present artistic, eccentric, and insane inhabitants of the most famous bohemian building in the world.

There’s a current that courses through the old Chelsea Hotel, a psychic electricity that drives people relentlessly to create. It’s an energy that longtime resident Ed Hamilton will tell you often drives inhabitants to madness. In a series of linked cyanide capsules, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel tells the odd, funny, and often tragic truth of the writers, artists, and musicians who have fallen prey to the Chelsea and slipped into eccentricity and even full-blown insanity.

Readers enter one of Dee Dee Ramone’s flashbacks; meet the ghost of author Thomas Wolfe; learn of a movie star’s mystical powers over women; see the ungodly acts allegedly being perpetrated in the basement club Serena’s; and feel the dark aura of Room 100, where punk rocker Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend Nancy.

A Valentine's Feast for a Kindred Free Spirit

In a remote corner of the Hotel Chelsea, behind a yellow door trimmed in red and topped with plastic flowers, lies a short hallway painted in the same red and yellow stripes. A unique, antique brass lighting fixture dangles from the ceiling. A turn to the left brings one into the main room, a dreamlike mélange of faded grandeur set against a backdrop of intense, radiant color.

On Feb. 14th, Valentine’s Day, friends of the late artist, witch and free spirit Vali Myers assembled in her old room at the Hotel Chelsea to commemorate her passing, as they have every year since her death on Feb. 12 in 2003. In no sense wicked, Vali was a witch with a heart of gold who touched a great many lives with her vibrant spirit and optimistic outlook. “To know her was to love her,” said poet, filmmaker and publisher Ira Cohen. “Vali was an original, a modern-day Kiki of Montparnasse. A million people were charmed by her.” Vali was a champion of life and love in all its varied manifestations, and hence it’s fitting that her friends should gather on a holiday that has its roots in an ancient pagan fertility festival. (READ MORE)