”Chelsea Hotel”: What the walls say about one of New York’s landmark buildings

All the walls contain their stories. Broadcast this Saturday evening on La Trois, Dreaming Walls looks at the red-brick ones of the historic Chelsea Hotel, which, built in 1883 at 222 West 23rd Street, has long been considered the tallest building in New York City and a mainstay of the counterculture of the 1960s. 1960. Sold in 2011 and under construction for years, the Chelsea Hotel became, February 2022, a luxury hotel.

Despite this refurbishment, its oldest tenants, protected by New York law, still find their residence there. The Belgian and French directors, Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, went to meet them while the hotel was still being renovated and therefore closed to the public. At that precise moment, the Chelsea Hotel no longer had anything of this mythical place that made them fantasize but rather a dilapidated building where “the plaster falls off the walls and where the cables run on the ceilings”.

Between archive videos and recent testimonials, the documentary also looks back on the personalities who have made the history of the establishment. By Leonard Cohen who wrote the song there Chelsea Hotel #2 inspired by his relationship with Janis Joplin to Andy Warhol who shot the film there The Chelsea Girls Passing by Madonna and Mariah Carey who found the ideal setting there for one of their music videos or even John Bon Jovi who shot the music video there for Midnight in Chelsea.

But the Chelsea Hotel is also home to “ghosts” testify some residents. These refer to the few tragedies that occurred inside the building such as the murder of Nancy Spungen, companion of Sid Vicious, stabbed in the bathtub of room 100 in 1978 or the suicide of the Irish poet Dylan Thomas in 1953. The singer Patti Smith, who lived in the hotel for a large part of her history with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, also confides that she walked through the door of the building for the first time because Dylan Thomas, “his great hero”, had set foot there and went to the roof of the building to “vomit up his rums and his whiskeys”.