Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too.
This is Stuff You Should Know, the super cool edition.
Another edition in our ongoing New York saga.
Yeah. between 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, do you know the T -shirt told me to?
It'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 wanna know more about it.
But 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.
Yeah. And I could not find who first turned it around because surely it was a poet or a singer or something, writer.
But at some point it got basically transversed even though the official name is and always has been since there was a hotel, the hotel Chelsea.
Yeah, it can be a little confusing.
Same place though, so 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 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.
it. 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.
And Chelsea. Yeah, I like it as well.
And I have stayed at the hotel Chelsea a couple of times.
I have too. But, 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.
Okay. 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 some. 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'd you think of it?
The hotel? Yeah. Well, 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 it was a top -notch renovation that, from what I've read, even though it's a 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 in the enhancements are fitting .ic Nice!
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.
It's changed hands a few times, but it's also stayed in really capable hands for decades.
Those capable hands, as we'll see, helped give the Chelsea Hotel 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 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 as a 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 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 a 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 designed by architect Philip...
is it Hubert or Hubert?
I'm going to say Hubert, that's what I would say.
Alright, 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 was a utopian socialist and kind of thought this concept 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 coops in New York City where if you live in a coop, 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.
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.
I don't know if you said it or not, it was one of the tallest buildings in New York at the time, so it was a very tonic address, when the building opened.
Yet, he set apartments aside for some of the people who had built the building, like some of the electricians if there was 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 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.
Uh, not so big into abstract, but yeah, sure.
I guess. Are you going places?
Right. We're not going to die.
Exactly. Uh, there are also in that very first iteration, and this is very key, you mentioned artists, but there were, the top floor had 15 artist studios up there, and that really kind of carried on throughout the history of the Chelsea, but until most recently.
Yeah. 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 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 long time 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 exalted 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 then maybe would have otherwise been produced.
At least according to Harry Smith, who was a trickster apparently so he might have been lying.
Also, the human brain works in funny ways and once a placement gets a reputation is that you go in there.
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. 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 what you're talking about.
I think you should have a second thought or two if you're like I'm gonna make an ode to the Chelsea hotel where there's a song, a movie, 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, like, frequent guests in those early years.
There were very famous artists of the time occupying those artists' studios on the top floor.
From the very beginning, they even held some Titanic survivors in 1912.
That's where they went when they were brought in, shivering in the cold.
Yeah, 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. We should say these artists that were staying here, 0 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. 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 a Bohemian – you'll hear those words thrown out a lot when you – the Chelsea Hotel is described in their – or its tendency over the years.
They were Czechoslovakian to a person.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Thomas Wolff 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 3am 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 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 Hundrest Thompson either.
No, he might be undoable.
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 LA. Years back.
Oof. I blocked that one out.
Yeah. I don't remember anything about it either.
So you mentioned a lot of people have 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 fourties.
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, and it 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, Dave described it as gruff but lovable, I mean it never lost that charm it seems like.
Even at its diviest Dylan Thomas the 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 and they don't plaques for everybody but there's a Dylan Thomas plaque Dylan Thomas lived and rode 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 gotta 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 became...
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.
Virgil. 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 of the tours, 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 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 in capable 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 this, I found this funny little fact that, you know, how little things can change history.
Um, 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, Well, 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 in like taking a painting in lieu of rent.
Like had it gone to just some money hungry, greedy people, it may have completely changed in 1943 and we wouldn't even be talking about it today.
Right. So had he not been a furry or allergic to fur, it may have been a completely different scene there.
But 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, I've got a pretty fun, like, apparently there was never any, like, 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.
And here's one good example about Stanley Bard. Arthur Miller called down after being so frustrated with how disgusting his carpet was.
He said, for Christ's sake, Stanley, don't you have a vacuum cleaner in the house?
And 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 her, another happy tenant.
And that was like, nothing was like ever wrong at the Chelsea.
People were dying and being wheeled out of there in overdoses and he would make jokes at like, no, the cops were here cause they lived there.
And the body bags and the gurnees are just props.
Yeah. So, apparently, Milos Foreman, 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 Alfaus Cole.
That's funny. He died in 1988.
The oldest man in the world at 112.
He died at the And that's the one person that Stanley could think of in the entire time that he was running the Chelsea Hotel.
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. It was cool. Like, 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 gotta read this other Arthur Miller quote is pretty good too He said the Chelsea and this is by the way from the Chelsea affect AFFECT, about the bards.
He said that Chelsea, whatever else it was, was a house of infinite toleration.
This was the bard's 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 Mad 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.
That's a great one.
Yeah. So, let's jump into the 60s and 70s, because that's when the Chelsea seem like it had some of its most notable events and residents, even if they were part time.
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 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 a very scathing, tough song.
Bob Dylan was the champion of the Aunty Love song, and this is kind of one of them.
But he writes about staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writing, a sad lady of the lowlands for you.
So, he references another song on, the same album that he wrote.
In Sarah. 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 Dilling 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 Because Bob Dylan was at the time, like basically the biggest person in alternative culture, the counter culture at the time.
Yeah. Like even more than Andy Warhol was.
Yeah. 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.
Clarke is adapting the screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey on a different floor and a different room.
So these kind of creative and Andy Warhol is in there shooting parts of Chelsea Girls.
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. And... 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 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 had on the community that developed in the Chelsea Hotel from the entire time that the building was open, and then as drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs.
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.
So the club kids, like with the capital C and the capital K in the 80s and 90s.
Yeah. Some of them lived there, and they were definitely doing drugs.
They're like, it was just a really big part of the experience of living at the Chelsea Hotel.
It was 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 until she was 11 years old.
Her mom was Viva, who was another one of Warhol superstars.
And little Gabby Hoffman from Sleepless in Seattle, she's a grown lady, middle -aged woman now, and has talked a lot about it.
She loved living there, but she was stepping over people, passed out with hair and needles in their arms and on our roller skates.
her and just kind of a crazy life.
But to her it was just like yeah, just lived in this sort of legendary diving apartment building, like there was a gazillion non -famous ones in New York.
This one just happened to be famous.
I did see where her mom Viva eventually, I don't think it was ever published, but she wrote a book because writers always like very cheekily say that like Gaby Hoffman was sort of the Chelsea Hotel's answer to Eloise, the children's book and apparently her mom wrote a book called Gaby at the Chelsea, but I don't think, I would try to find out if 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 Liaison's, Janis Joplin and Lynyrd Cohen.
That's a big one. Yeah.
He wrote about that in Chelsea Hotel Number Two, one of his songs, a very famous song.
So they were together from 68 to 70 when Janis 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.
Sure. 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.
those. See they were totally broke at the time.
Patti Smith became the poet of the punk scene.
Robert Maplethorpe 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 eighties.
Almost got the National Endowments for the Arts cancelled.
Although I think it's unfair to say it was Tim, Jesse Helms almost got the NEA canceled, and it was...
Robert Maplethorpe was just making art.
And Jesse Helms just did not think of bullwhip coming out of a man's rectum was art.
That's right. I had that book I haven't read yet, it's on the shelf with a bunch of other rock and roll books that I have yet to get to, but - The Jesse Helms Story?
Yeah, exactly. What a rock and roll story!
Patty Smith's book that she wrote about her time with Maplethorpe, I think it's called just kids that I'm looking forward to getting into.
But boy, can I tell a quick Patti Smith, Bob Dylan story?
Is there one? There's nothing to do with the Chelsea hotel?
Yeah. Well, you know what, I'm going to say it does.
I'll say she told him here.
Okay. 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 that he took up in 75, 76, some people look at that as like some peak Dylan live performance.
unbelievable stuff, but he has a performance of his song, ISIS, one of those 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 he, Patti Smith is the one who encouraged him, he said, Bob, you should do ISIS without the guitar.
And he said, Patti, I don't know what to do with my hands, And she said, make him into fists.
So did he? Hell, heck yeah he did.
And Patty Smith wrote also about the Chelsea a lot in the restaurant there.
It's not officially part of it but it's connected, you can get to it through the hotel El Quijote, underwent a lot of renovations.
To reopen it was a pretty big dive of a place 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 even green sauce paella, pictures of Where and Bottles of Tequila.
Jefferson Airplane was there.
So was Janice Joplin and her band Jimmy Hendrix, sat by the door.
Like, can you book, like, just walking into a restaurant and seeing something like that happening?
Incredible. 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's Starship.
You were like, one day, you don't know it yet.
you're gonna 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 can 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 ride for this.
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All right, we talked about people dying at the Chelsea.
So we should probably talk more specifically about this because it seemed to happen a lot, right?
Yeah, there were people who jumped out of Windows.
remember it was a 12 -story building and this was nothing new.
There was 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 Spongin 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 a biographer author name Phil Strongman or Strongman.
I would call myself Phil Strongman, if that were my name.
But he wrote a punk, a punk non -fiction book I guess called Pretty Vacant.
And he points to Rockets Red Glare, who was a body guard 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, Roket's 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 Rocket's Red glare from a lot of those early Jim Jarmusch movies.
Mm -hmm. 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 but known as the Rufus, was the codeword 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 have nothing to do with him.
I know. I love Ethan Hawke.
I think he's a great, passionate, artistic dude.
But he lived there for three years when he was sort of, I don't know, think he was fully divorced, but 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'm a big fan of that family.
Yeah, who's his daughter?
Mya Hawke, she's an actor.
No, 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. So, you mentioned that the Chelsea Hotel underwent renovations for a long time.
Mm -hmm. Over a decade from what I saw, The whole thing started when Stanley Bard was forced out back in 2007 or eight.
I saw both. Remember that his father, David Bard, had purchased the Chelsea with two other families, two other men.
Well, the heirs were basically like, you are not making money here.
He was very, Stanley was very famous for accepting art in lieu of rent if you were hard, you down on your luck, but you're an artist, he would just look the other way for a few months.
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.
Yeah. And that was when...
Big bummer. ...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 Stan Lee's or that wasn't the hotels 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're 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.
Like 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, it depends on your perspective.
There's a really, really good documentary that I highly recommend called Dreaming Walls from 2022 where they go inside at 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.
Oh, 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.
That's walking around all agog in the.
I know and like, with my nine -year -old daughter, who's not Gabby Hoffman.
She's not on roller skates, she's not an Uncle Buck.
I know, so a very mixed feelings about the whole thing, About like if the staying there support that kind of action in general or well You know, you know bring that I thought that to you me and I stay there a couple of times Over the years we did the most avant -garde thing you can do We stayed at the Chelsea hotel when we went to see comedian Tom Rhodes at the Gotham Comedy Club next door Oh, yeah, that's really 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 the dolled up version, like kind of the fake Disney fight version of what it used to be.
For sure. 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 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 wanna 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, it's a pretty easy target, but I bet the Holiday Inn Express and Times Square kicked out some residents for whatever building they took over.
Is there any hotel group on the earth that isn't gross and did things like that in these densities?
Yeah. I mean, look what happened to San Francisco.
It lost a lot of its...
Oh, yeah. ... I don't want to say luster, because it wasn't luster that made it so charming, but it lost some of its jam.
Yeah, for sure. But, you know, El Quijote is awesome now.
They've got some really good chefs that worked there.
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.
In that hotel, the lobby bar there is amazing.
It's a truly great place to go have a drink, and if you stay there, you can get in.
But if you don't stay there, you can still go get a drink there, I would recommend it.
So I don't know. It definitely makes me question things, but like I said, 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?
Oh, because it's not like the sub -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 gotta...
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.
tell, 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, like - Oh yeah, yeah, good call.
Some of the famous doors Bob Dylan's Door was auctioned off, I think either Leonard Cohen or Janice 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 in 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 to see on both sides, an H and E on both sides, and 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, if this is about inner monologues too because I mentioned aside for 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.
In the latest episode, Chuck mentioned Emily spells out words with her thumb while stressed.
I do something extremely similar.
But instead of tracing the letters, I spell them out in the sign language alphabet.
Wow. And there are all kinds of variations.
Some people air type.
Sometimes it's cursive.
sometimes as sign language like it's really interesting.
I spell them out in sign language alphabet, been doing it since 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 peccadillas.
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 gonna 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 Niter, or Neater, I'm not sure how you pronounce it.
You are in a larger club, because we got heard from a lot of you.
Yeah, that is really cool.
I'm glad Emily's delighted.
Yeah. I'm delighted too.
Me too. Well, if you wanna be like Lauren and write in and let us know that you're a part of a club too, well, we'd love to hear that kind of stuff.
you can send it off to StuV Podcast at IHeartRadio .com.
StuV You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
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