CHELSEA HOTEL
Revised e dition
R a P hs by
Fo R ewo R d by
i nt R oduction by
a bbeville P R ess New York London
Photog
Claudio Edinger
Alexandra Auder
Pete Hamill
To Gunther, Dascha, and Mina
To the memory of Philippe Halsman
For the first edition
Editor: Walton Rawls
Assistant editor: David Markus
Layout: Len Zabala
Photographs, photographer’s statement, and captions copyright ©1983, 2024 Claudio Edinger. Foreword copyright ©2024 Alexandra Auder. Other texts copyright ©1983 their respective authors. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Abbeville Press, 655 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Printed in Brazil.
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The first time I saw the Chelsea Hotel, I immediately disliked it. It was about 11 pm, and I was escorting my friend Christiane, a French painter, into the lobby. A tide of hookers and leatherboys swirled around us. I thought—Wow, what a zoo! I glanced at Christiane and wondered how she could possibly live in such a place. But she was quite at home. “This is a fabulous place for artistes,” she said. “I don’t have to take the gallery dealers to my tiny room—I see them right here in the lobby.” I shook my head, still somewhat confused. “And besides,” she smiled, “it’s cheap.”
Several weeks later, when I found myself eased out of the penthouse I lived in, I recalled Christiane’s words from the hotel’s lobby: “The Chelsea is for you. You could do a terrific book on the place.” However, with my impending change of address, the only book I had in mind was my bankbook, and its message was painfully clear—either start packing for Queens, head for the YMCA, or hope there is a room at the Chelsea. So off I went, lurching downtown on an IRT train to 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue, just half a block from the aging hotel that would become my home.
The Chelsea looked quite nice in the daytime, a tall but not too towering structure, decorated in the front with finely contoured ironwork balconies—the kind of building an architect would call an eclectic mix of Beaux Arts and Gothic themes, or, as one resident put it, “The closest thing to Europe in New York.”
Inside I met the manager, Stanley Bard, a softspoken, middleaged man with a rangy build. He agreed to give me a quick tour of the available rooms, but what I saw were spaces that by my native Brazilian standards would qualify as modest closets with beds and windows. Much too small for my taste. I was
Photographer’s Statement
just about to give up on the place when Stanley suggested I take a look at one last room.
We rode up a slow elevator to the tenth floor and walked down the welllighted marble corridor to the door Stanley gently pushed open. Not bad, I thought. The ceiling was high, the view was good, and there was space to extend my arms. Stanley promised free answering service, towels, room service, and a little refrigerator. The toilet was on the hall, and communal, but I could live with that, at least until something better came along. I looked at Stanley, who was already smiling, and said, “I’ll take it”—thinking it’s got to beat going back to Brooklyn.
My first weeks in the hotel were like the beginning of an unforgettable summer vacation in an exotic retreat full of offbeat, inquisitive people. Everywhere I went, from the bathroom to the elevators to the lobby, I met a new face and a new story. Even beyond the Chelsea, throughout New York, I met people with incredible tales about the old hotel. This went on until one morning I awoke with a strange feeling of affection for the place. I was like the reluctant husband, one month into an arranged marriage to a woman he’d neither known nor cared about, who little by little has grown accustomed to his wife. It wasn’t quite love—but it was heading that way—when I began planning to make this book.
But as usually happens in a place like the Chelsea, people and events that surround them preempted my plans. I was reading on my bed one night when a fire alarm sounded. Everyone was dashing for the stairwells, clutching their children, guitars, typewriters, pets and unfinished paintings. Grabbing my cameras, I joined the parade and began to snap away in the con
fusion. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it provided me with the impetus I needed to start.
Then my problems began. A woman from the fifth floor, an artist named Bettina, who saw me taking pictures, was convinced that I was with the FBI. She called me to let me know she knew. A notorious Lothario, once convicted of rape, menaced me with black magic, because I photographed him in the halls without his permission. For weeks afterward I checked around my door for little dolls bristling with steel pins. Then, of course, there was chère Christiane, who, upon entering her midforties, married a sixfoottwo sixteenyearold whose parents went wild when they heard the news. They drove the boy quite literally mad, and forced him to leave his bride. Later he would repeatedly call Christiane in a fury and threaten to kill her. One night I intervened and picked up the phone only to be told with cool dispatch, “Listen, you; after her, you’re next.”
The room next to mine, a small cubbyhole, hosted an amazing string of Chelsea residents. First, there was a wino who would leave the hotel every afternoon scrubbed and sober, only to return late each night completely disheveled, crawling on all fours like a stunned and bewildered bear. In summer, he would sleep naked with his door wide open to “refrigerate” himself, he would say. After him came a divorced painter who would keep me up till all hours with her loud rock music and the cries of her lovemaking. The outer walls of the Chelsea are about three feet thick, but most of the inside walls are very thin—one can almost hear his neighbor scratch his head. Then came another nocturnal activist who at 4 am would begin to shriek, “You bum, the electric chair is on you; the death is on you.” And when I complained to the desk, she answered the calls with a continuing litany of “The death is on you. The electric chair is on you. You bum, the death is on you.” After her, a neatlooking guy moved in, whom I took for an office clerk. The
next night I saw him in the lobby. He was wearing black leather and chains. After him came a nymphomaniac. After her a drunk lady who would scream in the halls. I suppose I could have done a book just on my nextdoor neighbors, but at what cost to my safety and sanity I’ll never know.
Instead, I pointed my camera at the more coherent residents of the Chelsea, and confirmed what Christiane had told me all along—that the Chelsea is a veritable hothouse of creative talent. Within those four walls artistic brilliance has flourished like nothing I have seen before. It was in the Chelsea that Arthur Clarke wrote 2001—A Space Odyssey and Virgil Thomson wrote his famous American opera, Lord Byron—not to mention the countless paintings, sculptures, songs, plays, poems, and even babies that were created there. “It was in the Chelsea,” boasts Stanley Bard, “that Brendan Behan’s wife finally conceived after years of unsuccessful attempts elsewhere.”
If there is a catalyst for all this creative energy, it has to be the freedom and sense of tolerance that pervade the hotel. Arthur Miller once said, “Here you don’t have to wear a tie to pick up your keys.” “And if you are an artist and late with the rent,” says cubist sculptor Schmuel Kudish, “Stanley will understand.”
For me, one man, George Kleinsinger, best illustrates what the Chelsea is all about. George was the author of the children’s play Tubby the Tuba and the opera Archy and Mehitabel, based on Don Marquis’s story of an eloquent cockroach and an impulsive cat. He took a penthouse studio in the hotel to escape the cultural abyss of suburbia. Ten floors above 23rd Street, he created an environment all his own, playing host to an incredible assortment of snakes, monkeys, skunks, doves, turtles, and plants. “This is my tropical island,” he would tell the visitor, who ranged from the kid downstairs (who would come to see him feed mice to his python) to Walter Cronkite.
In time, most of the beasts moved on to other dwellings. The snake was too much for the maids, who steadfastly refused to clean George’s room. And after one of the monkeys relieved himself on Mr. Cronkite’s head, he, too, was sent packing. The skunk was a jealous sort, and tended to bite George whenever he entertained an attractive admirer. He had moved to the Bronx Zoo by the time George met his third wife Susan in a Chelsea elevator. But the doves remain, as does George’s famous rooftop garden of exotic plants, and his turtle, Gray, who would dance a step or two whenever he heard a fetching tune.
“I’ll only leave the Chelsea feet first,” George used to say. And when he did, dead of cancer at sixtyeight, his wife continued to tend the animals and keep the garden into which she poured his ashes. In the hotel
there was the feeling that George had never left. People kept talking about him; his legend grew. Nothing seemed to change that much. There is a strange timelessness about the people of the Chelsea, something that has worn off on the place itself, something I’ve tried to find through my pictures. It’s like what poet B. H. Williams wrote:
Poets, artists, and musicians
Parade in by the score,
And, occasionally, someone famous Will walk through the front door. And there stands Stanley Bard saying, “We hope everything goes well, because we want you here forever at the Chelsea Hotel”
She’s a Swiss fashion stylist who owns an avantgarde clothing store in SoHo. “This is a vertical village,” she says, “with all the conveniences of a villa.”
Bartsch would become famous in the 1980s as a nightlife impresario.
susanne ba R tsch
ann l . stubbs
Former radio interviewer, photographer, and writer, she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1979 and is currently writing a book chronicling modern art from World War II to the present.
A painter and longtime resident. At the age of eightyone he gave a painting to the hotel manager, who agreed never to raise his rent. Mr. Cole is now 106 years old.
Cole died at the Chelsea in 1988, at the age of 112. At the time of his death, he was the world’s oldest living man.
al P heus cole
b R uce cam P bell
A former rock band leader, Campbell is now writing two musicals for Broadway. He plays the piano in an uptown French restaurant. From his penthouse triplex he defines the Chelsea as “a cross between the Plaza and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.”
Campbell, better known as the 1970s glam rocker Jobriath, died of AIDS at the Chelsea in 1983.
He’s a hockey player with a master’s degree in psychology. During the day he often practices in the halls. At night he’s into “bondage and discipline.”
steve sloan