Leonard Cohen Is Dead — and the Chelsea Hotel Doesn't Feel So Good Itself

CHELSEA, NY — In a city drowning in political unrest and general feelings of hopelessness, the Chelsea Hotel became a central grieving point Thursday night after news broke that Leonard Cohen, one of its most famous former tenants and the singer-poet behind "Chelsea Hotel No. 2" — a song about an elevator tryst with the great Janis Joplin, "while limousines wait in the street" — had passed away at age 82. His absence, if not physical then existential, hit New York like salt in a thousand wounds.

Overnight Thursday, dozens of fans placed candles, love letters, flowers, cigarettes and cups of wine outside the 12-story brick building at 222 West 23rd St., a rundown but enduring icon of the neighborhood's artistic glory days for Chelsea residents and tourists alike.

Take a moment to peer through the front windows of the hotel-turned-apartment complex, and here is what you'll see:

What is even in there anymore, you ask?

In short, a decade's worth of carnage left behind by exploitative landlords and real-estate sharks. That, and 24 "open violations" at the property — including gaping elevator shafts (so Joplin and Cohen can court freely in death, perhaps), screwy gas lines and half-demolished rooms endangering tenants on other floors, city records show. A "stop work order" is currently in effect at the property.

But the 50 or so longtime Chelsea Hotel tenants who've ridden out the storm are (very cautiously) optimistic that things are about to change. Just last week, after nearly 10 years of rotating hotel owners who tried to push out rent-controlled tenants — at best, offering them buy-outs, and at worst, illegally intimidating them into leaving — the latest owner, Ed Scheetz, reportedly sold the iconic hotel to a group of hoteliers under the name SIR Chelsea LLC for $250 million.

The building's new owners plan to renovate the building and re-open it as a combination hotel and condo building in 2018, according to local news site Chelsea Now:

They plan to build 25,000 square feet of condo space at the Chelsea, although it is unclear how that will be spread in the hotel, which has been renovated, gutted, and “butchered” by previous owners throughout its 131 years, according to Zoe Pappas, the president of the Chelsea Hotel Tenant Association.

She met [the building's new owners] in February, and is optimistic that they will do right by the 50 or so long-term tenants — the Chelsea Hotel’s last real connection to its past as the home of some of most important creative minds of the 20th century — and finally finish the renovation process many tenants want to put behind them.

In an email interview with Patch the morning after Cohen died, Artie Nash, a former tenant of the hotel, said without Cohen's song about the Chelsea — and the legacy of his residency there, alongside legends like Joplin, Bob Dylan, William Boroughs and Sid Vicious — the hotel would probably have ended up "an image on a postcard."

"The Chelsea could easily have become just another fleabag under the wrecking ball instead of an enduring artistic mecca, a reputation that would help preserve not just the brick and wrought iron exterior but her interiors, as well, throughout the dilapidated 70s, 80s, and up until quite recently," Nash wrote.

But over time, Nash said, the history of the hotel has been tokenized by generations who "began feeding off of the nostalgia surrounding the Chelsea, cannibalizing the past and the celebrity of those who came before them."

That degrading approach to reviving the Chelsea could — key word, could — be replaced by a more constructively nostalgic touch under the hotel's new ownership.

Thankfully, the hotel's got 50 or so diehard tenants willing to live in a decaying death trap until justice is served and a historic neighborhood landmark is rightfully preserved. “They have their hands full, we’re here — that’s a fait accompli,” first-floor resident Judith Childs told Chelsea Now. “The better they do, the sooner they get things fixed, the sooner we’re out of their hair."

Lead photo by k_tjaaa/Flickr