Chelsea Hotel: Where the Walls Still Talk (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Chelsea Hotel: Where the Walls Still Talk (2013)

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44 pointssaadalem10 comments

NYC loves to glorify its days as a so-called artists' mecca while doing everything to make sure it'll never be that again.

Definitely agree that it's much harder for artists to live in NYC now. Implying it wasn't (or even isn't still) an artists' mecca is silly though.

"Staying up for nights in the Chelsea Hotel writing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you."

Bob Dylan, "Sara" (his wife)

"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel You were famous, your heart was a legend You told me again you preferred handsome men But for me you would make an exception "

Leonard Cohen regarding Janis Joplin - “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,”

Some other songs from Blonde on Blonde (which is my favorite Dylan album) were written in the Chelsea Hotel too. From Visions of Johanna:

Lights flicker from the opposite loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft

But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

Visions of Johanna is my all-time favourite Dylan song. I've listened to it so many times, not least because in the winter of 1972 in a very cold flat in Edinburgh the _only_ album we had to listen to, for reasons, mostly poverty, was Blonde on Blonde. Still, if you are going to be stuck with one album, that's the one to be stuck with.

Lived there for a year in '93 or '94, I forget. It's a 'dark' building. I remember Stanley, a somewhat unpleasant little man. Had one of my episodic software breakthroughs there -- was obsessively diagramming object graphs in those days -- and did some art there too for which you will have to wait until I'm conveniently and appropriately dead. And no, the ghost of Nancy did not show up. Creepiest bathroom ever.

Rufus Wainwright mentioning Susanne Bartsch, Walt Paper and Limelight evokes the 90s in NYC. People always comment how Haight Ashbury and the hippies in SF influenced Steve Jobs and the PC revolution. But I don't think anyone properly recalls how club kid culture begat Web 1.0 startups like Pseudo TV & Kozmo.com ;)

I still like the concept of a bohemian space for creative young people to flock to in Manhattan. Like Barbizon 63 in the 1950s and Westbeth in the 1970s. Doesn't really exist anymore except in maybe Bushwick?

How did one go about living there in '93-94? Was there an application?

I had the pleasure of staying there for a couple of nights in 2008. The hallways smelt of burning incense. As I waited for the key to my room, I remember someone coming up to reception, saying that they'd like to film a documentary about the place. The guy just looked at them and said no, fuck off.

Patti Smith wrote about living in the Chelsea with Mapplethorpe in her book Just Kids, a fascinating picture of that scene in the 70's

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