New chapter begins for artists’ hangout

The first time Zoe Pappas set foot in the Hotel Chelsea, in the mid-1990s, she considered walking out again.

‘‘It was a dump,’’ she says. ‘‘It looked like a bad-quality bordello.’’

A month there confirmed her suspicion that she ought to find somewhere else to live, but Stanley Bard, the proprietor, wouldn’t hear of it.

‘‘He said, Zoe! You can’t do that! Nobody moves out of the Chelsea’,’’ Pappas recalls.

The New York City hotel was still living on its reputation as a magical space that drew artists and writers and musicians. This was where Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey; where the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lived; where Arthur Miller bunked with Marilyn Monroe; where Leonard Cohen had a fling with Janis Joplin and wrote a song about it.

In a documentary, Dreaming Walls, Patti Smith explains the attraction. ‘‘I’ve always liked to be where the big guys were,’’ she says, standing on the roof. ‘‘Dylan Thomas used to hang out on this very roof.’’

Bard often accepted works of art in lieu of payment, which explained the eclectic collection of paintings on the walls.

Bard was ousted in 2007. From 2011, a succession of developers tried to renovate the Chelsea.

Tenants endured ‘‘11 years of cacophonous noise, dust and diminished services, and life amidst the wreckage of a demolition/construction site’’, says Ed Hamilton, a tenant and author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel. The grand red-brick facade was sheathed in scaffolding, and the hotel itself seemed to recede into a memory.

Two weeks ago, the scaffolding finally came down. And now tourists are arriving.

The Chelsea has been remade by Richard Born, Ira Drukier and Sean MacPherson, the developers behind boutique hotels in New York and California, who bought it for US$250 million in 2016.

‘‘I have never had a project take quite as long,’’ Drukier says. The building was old, and there were tenants. The tenants complained that they were being harassed – and they sued, securing an order from the city that halted work for two years. ‘‘Then we had Covid.’’

With the hotel came a warehouse of paintings by former residents. ‘‘The people who lived here all had similar dreams. They all wanted to be a painter, an artist, a writer,’’ Drukier says.

‘‘Some succeeded. Some didn’t. The ones that succeeded didn’t work any harder than the ones that didn’t.’’

Among them was Bettina Grossman, an artist who lived on the fifth floor, her flat becoming so full of her work that she had to sleep in the hallway. She died last November.

‘‘Now people have ‘discovered’ her,’’ says Drukier. ‘‘Her whole life, no-one paid any attention to her.’’

Some tenants remain critical. Hamilton feels that ‘‘a half-baked attempt has been made to recreate the look of the old hotel’’, but he is glad that some details have been preserved.

‘‘The people coming back seem, in many ways, to be the same as those who sought the place out before,’’ he says. ‘‘That, as far as I see it, is a problem for Ira and his partners. They want to attract the super-wealthy ... they are getting the same old bohemians.’’

Pappas, a structural engineer who is also president of the tenants’ association, is delighted with the revived Chelsea.

The hotel is back to ‘‘the way it was when it opened in the 1880s’’, she says. ‘‘They have put the best-quality finishes, the best quality of everything.’’