29 Jan 2014 01:47:24
In the seething, druggy summer of 1969, a room in the Chelsea hotel gave me my first view of New York. The establishment – a Queen Anne folly with a rooftop pyramid on West 23rd Street, opened in 1884 – was not quite the dream palace of Sherill Tippins's title: it struck me more as a trauma ward. Pimps and pushers loitered in the lobby; a transvestite dispensed room keys behind a shield of bulletproof glass; a trip upstairs in the elevator could get you high in more ways than one, given the captive cloud of pot fumes in the clanking box. The marble stairwell resounded to the ululations of resident rock bands, and once in a corridor I collided with shaggy Janis Joplin, awash in a swill of Librium, tranquillisers and heroin topped up by Southern Comfort, as she staggered towards the overdose that killed her a year later. I had never felt so grubby, so at risk, or so excited. Back then, the Chelsea was the last redoubt of the counterculture, with a population that included the megalomaniac "superstars" of Andy Warhol's confessional film The Chelsea Girls, along with the part-time hooker Valerie Solanas, who advocated the castration of all males and inaugurated her crusade by shooting the already epicene Warhol. The Yippie activist Abbie Hoffmann, on the run from the FBI, sometimes visited in disguise; Robert Mapplethorpe checked in suffering from trench mouth, with Patti Smith, who resembled his androgynous twin, ministering to him as both muse and nurse. To supplement the human fauna, one apartment with a high ceiling accommodated a jungle of imported Asian trees embedded in dank soil, with iguanas, monkeys and a python 8ft long infesting the undergrowth.
Yet as Tippins discloses in her funny, scary chronicle, this sanctuary for eccentrics and outlaws began as an idealist's utopia, with a ground plan that attempted to redeem profit-mongering America. The architect Philip Hubert was a disciple of the revolutionary sociologist Charles Fourier, who thought that Americans might be cured of their competitiveness if they lived together in a self-sufficient community which, using a military analogy, he called a phalanx; each of these model societies was to be housed in a "phalanstery", a multicameral mansion that would provide for the complementary exchange of expertise and the pooling of labour. As New York grew rapidly richer after the civil war, the bourgeoisie had retreated into the blinkered privacy of their townhouses. Flats were considered immodest or immoral, a reminiscence of working-class warrens downtown. The Chelsea was Hubert's compromise between the gregarious tenement and the forbidding, insulated brownstone – a "home club association" for shareholders, which became a prototype for New York's housing co-ops.
Its architectural layout and decorative details dramatised the building's purpose. A fireplace in the lobby was a communal hearth, and gargoyles chuckled convivially in the shared dining room. The glazed dome above the stairwell let in the light of the mind, with wrought-iron sunflowers on the balconies outside the rooms paying homage to the creative fecundity of nature. The Chelsea was less a palace than a temple.
Hubert's project had a short life: the Chelsea soon despaired of attracting permanent residents intent on high-minded pursuits, and in 1905 it reopened as a hotel. The phalanstery turned into what Tippins calls a "shabby caravansery", catering to transients who either did not mind its scuffed linoleum, scuttling cockroaches and threadbare sheets stigmatised by cigarette burns, or else considered squalor to be a credential of the bohemian life.
By 1939 the hotel was bankrupt; an altruistic new owner kept it going by running it as a halfway house for artists, accepting their canvases in lieu of rent. This investment was sometimes shrewd but more often foolhardy. When Peggy Guggenheim took over a private dining room to present Jackson Pollock to her rich friends, the abstract expressionist expressed himself by vomiting on the floor. A connoisseur on the staff had the idea of cutting out and framing the square of smeared carpet, sure it would be worth millions, but Pollock's regurgitated meal has never been offered for sale at Sotheby's. Other aesthetic souvenirs proved to be less portable. One of Warhol's sacred monsters, the tubby Brigid Berlin, once collapsed in a drunken coma and landed on a tube of glue, which affixed her to the floorboards.
The Chelsea – like its LA equivalent, the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi overdosed and Helmut Newton died in the parking lot – began to accumulate a starry necrology. Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan stayed there while conscientiously drinking themselves to death; other residents hurled themselves from the roof or – more considerate of passers-by on the street below – quietly committed suicide in their rooms. The low point came in 1978 when the whiny New Jersey groupie Nancy Spungen died of stab wounds under a bathroom sink, allegedly murdered by Sid Vicious. In a baleful omen, odd letters in the hotel's vertical neon sign fitfully flickered: it now spelled out HO EL HEL, as if trying to utter the word "hellhole".
Tippins works her way through more than a century of increasingly lurid and seamy anecdotes, but though she enjoys her anthology of disgraceful antics, her emphasis is on the sad travesty of the Chelsea's founding premise as the collectivism promoted by Hubert foundered into the woozy self-absorption of the 1960s. Video cameras rigged up by Shirley Clarke briefly turned the building into "one interactive electronic unit", with the residents as careening neurons; otherwise, in Tippins's judgment, drugs dissolved both "social and neuronal barriers" and "traditional value structures". Another American dream had warped into lunacy.
Given the funkiness of her subject, Tippins reaches startlingly moralistic conclusions about the Chelsea's downfall. Arthur Miller fancied that he would find peace and quiet there, and after moving out in a huff he accused Warhol of making the place "wild and unmanageable". Tippins extends the blame to an "American age of abdication", when a generation of pampered baby boomers demanded "all the benefits of a life without limits without any of the costs". Being an artist now required no talent, only a capacity for shameless self-display. Another of the washed-up Warhol superstars, after half a century spent cadging food and drink in the Chelsea, boasts of his career as "a cross between a butterfly and a lapdog" and explains that the world owes him a living – and, nowadays, a pension – because "I class up a joint".
The Chelsea closed in 2011, and is in currently being ripped apart by developers. I have friends with controlled rents who are still holding out on an upper floor. When I last visited, their door was swathed in thick plastic to keep out toxins released by the demolition around them, and the ground beneath us shuddered seismically as jackhammers battered the walls. The ultimate intentions of the real estate magnates remain unclear. What could be worse, I sometimes wonder, than the raffish anarchy I remember from 1969? But I know the answer: a boutique hotel, which would change the Chelsea – as New York itself has changed – from a wide-open playground to a sleek, exclusive fortress for big money.
