'You Had to Be a Dealer to Get a Job as a Bellboy': The Chelsea Hotel

‘New York Groove: An Inside Look at the Stars, Shows & Songs That Make NYC Rock’ Book Excerpt

Frank Mastropolo

Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street, 2021. © Frank Mastropolo

Opened in the 1880s, the Chelsea Hotel has been a temporary home for many writers, artists, and actors. Years of disrepair earned the hotel its seedy reputation, which did nothing to discourage scores of musicians from visiting.

“If you let the maid in to clean your room, everything would be gone,” Keith Richards told Melody Maker in 1979. “You had to be a certified dealer to get a job as a bellboy.”

Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, and Alice Cooper were guests. Leonard Cohen wrote “Chelsea Hotel #2” about his affair with Janis Joplin in 1968. “My lungs gathered my courage,” Cohen recalled in Rolling Stone. 

“I said to her, ‘Are you looking for someone?’ She said ‘Yes, I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.’ I said, ‘Little lady, you’re in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.’”

Patti Smith wrote poetry while she worked at Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue from 1967–1972. Smith earned enough money at Scribner’s to move into the Chelsea Hotel with her lover, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in the early 1970s. 

Smith’s poems were influenced by the counterculture writers she met at the hotel. “Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.”

Bob Dylan wrote “Sara,” about his relationship with his wife at the time, at the Chelsea. It contains the line “Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / Writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you.” 

Madonna lived at the hotel in the 1980s and in 1992 shot photos for her book Sex in room 822. After a three-week stay, Jorma Kaukonen wrote “Third Week in the Chelsea” for Jefferson Airplane’s 1971 album Bark.

On Oct. 12, 1978, Sid Vicious, former bassist of the Sex Pistols, was arrested for the stabbing death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in room 100. Vicious, a heroin addict, died of an overdose in February 1979 while awaiting trial.

The Chelsea Hotel closed in 2011 for what would become years of renovations to transform it into a luxury destination in 2022.

Frank Mastropolo is the author of New York Groove: An Inside Look at the Stars, Shows & Songs That Make NYC Rock. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.