No two rooms in the Chelsea Hotel look anything alike. The
furniture is a far-flung collection of different era, and each bed, table,
dresser, and rug looks old enough to have been made right here in the USA, no
particle board desks to be seen. We might as well call it “Garage Sale Gothic”
and if the furniture were in better condition, they would be museum pieces.
Hotel Chelsea is
one of many books on the Chelsea Hotel, but it focuses on the décor rather than
the people. This is not going to be a typical Martha Stewart style book,
because the furniture is randomly placed and the paint schemes are random. What
makes this book great is that it isn’t stylish at all; this is exactly how the
average New Yorker would decorate an apartment. Few of us can afford fancy
furniture and rugs, so we have to buy what we can. My father, for instance,
used to take old furniture right off the street, sand it down, and refinish it.
He’s told me hilarious stories about bringing home an old bureau in the mid
1970’s, full of dead cockroaches, and vacuuming them all out. The only thing
louder than the vacuum was my mother’s screams.
Victoria Cohen photographs the many rooms, some with
beautiful furniture, some with cheap-looking 80’s accessories. Most of the
rooms are well-maintained, however, so I can assure you this is not a welfare
hotel. The owners tried to match the furniture to the look of the room, such as
a red leather armchair in front of a red wall. Room 617 has old nasty
wallpaper, contrasting with the recently repainted white molding. One room has
a flowery old divan next to a lace curtain, while another has a small
scratched-up desk and ugly red curtains. When I saw this room, I was reminded
of Joe Buck’s fleabag room in Midnight
Cowboy, before he gets locked out for not paying rent. I wonder if the
average out-of-town transient would’ve been put off by the curtains, or felt
right at home? Depending on his situation, it would probably not have been much
different from mom & dad’s tract house.
Cohen is a New York based photographer, and like anyone
enamored with the city, had a fascination with the Chelsea Hotel (or Hotel
Chelsea, if you prefer.) She was not happy to hear the sad new in 2011, that it
was closing down to be renovated, and all the charm and history would be gone.
This was the same place where Arthur C. Clarke began 2001 A Space Odyssey,
where William S. Buroughs wrote Naked Lunch, where Leonard Cohen met Janis Joplin,
and where Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend. The last one we could do
without, but what about the rest? Doesn’t this hotel anchor a lot of the city’s
history? It certainly took in a lot of the people that were not especially
welcome among the Eloise crowd at the Plaza Hotel. You wouldn’t see a lot of
kids in this hotel, except for Gabby Hoffman, who lived here until age 11. In
describing the hotel where she grew up, she says it was a great place to be,
like every day was an adventure. Like most of us, she wasn’t happy to see it
closed off and full of construction dust.
Maybe this book about the Chelsea’s décor is the antithesis
to the hotel business? It was never a choice lodging for affluent people
visitors, mostly popular with writers, artists, people with less money to
spend. After WWII, the owner took artwork in place of rent, so his art collection
was probably worth as much as the hotel. My fault with this book is that it
leaves out the artwork; the hotel’s walls were festooned with art from all the
people that lived there, and the hallways were like one great big gallery. I
wish the photographer had included some in the book, but you can still see it
in other books about the hotel. Cohen does make it clear, however, that she was
interested in the individual hotel rooms, not the residential apartments. The
long-term residents could decorate how they liked and throw parties, but the
short-term renters weren’t there for fame; they came to “drop off the radar” and
be anonymous. Kind of like E.B. White describes in his book Here Is New York, it’s a city of
anonymity.
Oscar Wilde, on the last night of his life, wrote “either
the wallpaper goes, or I go.” He was referring to the hideous wall paper of his
room in Paris, where he retreated as an anonymous expatriate. While Oscar Wilde’s
widely-celebrated last words are seen as those of a genius critic, I’d rather
see old décor celebrated. The average bohemian, living in austere circumstances,
should celebrate the cheap décor as part of the adventure.
A good title for this book would be “Chelsea Hotel: Ode to
An Old Dresser.”
No comments:
Post a Comment