Photo by Wally Gobetz via flickr
1.
Anita! Soon this Chelsea Hotel
Will vanish before the city’s merchant greed,
Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead
More lofty walls will swell
This old street’s populace. Then who will know
About its ancient grandeur, marble stairs,
Its paintings, onyx-mantels, courts, the heirs
Of a time now long ago?
~ “The Hotel Chelsea” (1936), Edgar Lee Masters
2.
French-born Philip Gengembre Hubert designed and built Chelsea Hotel, a socialist co-op in which tenants shared expenses to save money. The twelve-story, 250-room redbrick behemoth opened in 1884, taking up most of the block between 7th and 8th Avenues on West 23rd Street.
Hubert set aside ‘units’ for those who constructed the hotel: bricklayers, stonecutters, plumbers, electricians, painters, and ironworkers. They lived next door to poets, musicians, singers, playwrights, and actors. All shared meals in communal dining halls. Art studios stretched across the top floor.
3.
1905. The failed utopian experiment reopened as a luxury hotel.
1930s. Decades of wear and neglect forced management to drop prices, thus attracting Bohemians and artists struggling to define themselves.
1953. Dylan Thomas (room #205) magnified the hotel’s seedy reputation after finishing off a bottle of Old Grand Dad. “I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskies,” he said. “I think that’s the record.”
1962. Playwright Arthur Miller moved into #614 after his marriage to Marilyn Monroe crumbled. He stayed eight years, writing the play “After the Fall.”
1966. Andy Warhol shot much of his 3-½ hour double-screen, underground docudrama Chelsea Girls in a hotel suite. The film is a mélange of scripted and unscripted action, odd encounters, untidy sex, and brazen drug use, where fiction fades into macabre reality.
1967. German-born singer Nico recorded the song “Chelsea Girls” written by Lou Reed and inspired by Warhol’s film. Nico appears in a grain-swimming black and white clip that shows her trimming her bangs so “my hair won’t get stuck in my—”
1968. Leonard Cohen (#424) met a twenty-five-year-old singer from Port Arthur, Texas, in the dilapidated elevator. Janis Joplin (#411) and Big Brother and the Holding Company were in the city to record their second album, later titled Cheap Thrills.
1976. Bob Dylan wrote “Sara” in #211.
1978. British punk rocker Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in #100.
4.
Before the Chelsea, Leonard Cohen lived in a 19th Century whitewashed stone house on Hydra, Island of a Thousand Tales. He paid $1,500 for the three-story home, which lacked plumbing, running water and electricity. He had a simple outdoor toilet and read by the light of paraffin lamps.
When telephone poles arrived, so did migrating birds. Leonard’s lover and muse, Marianne Ihlen, once remarked that a bird perched on a wire looked like a musical note. “Bird on the Wire” appears on Leonard’s 1968 album “Songs from a Room”:
“Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free . . . ”
The album’s back cover shows Marianne sitting at Leonard’s desk in his sparse writing room. Part of her bare bottom is visible beneath the white towel wrapped around her middle. Her fingers are poised above the keys on his beloved green Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter.
5.
Leonard’s room at the Chelsea, #424:
A naked bulb cast light on a flimsy bed, a boxy black-and-white TV, and books by Spanish poets and French philosophers. The tiny sink spat rusty water, if any at all. Towels were as thin as bed-sheets. Did he mix up batches of mac and cheese on his hotplate? Heat Campbell’s Tomato Rice soup?
When I peer at the sepia-tone photograph on his debut album “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” the boudoir sexy man peers back in all his charismatic malaise. On the cover’s flip side: An image of Anima Sola or Lonely Soul, a soft-faced woman, naked and in bondage amid flames. Her spirit triumphs over physical matter, a reoccurring theme in Leonard’s work.
I fell hard for his gypsy lyrics. His word pictures are all personal and transported me from the saintly to the profane and back again. I ached to be his Marianne, Judy, Joni, Janis, Nico, but mostly his Suzanne.
When he sings “Suzanne” (released in 1967) there’s such shipwrecked longing:
“Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters . . ..”
Emotion is eternal in Leonard’s words. His intellect, always deep and rigorous, sometimes naked, other times humorous. I still weep over the Flamenco fingerpicking intro to “Suzanne” and I still dream of his fingers touching my (un)perfect body with his mind.
6.
Spring 1968, Greenwich Village. A dismal time in Leonard’s career.
A late night walk, a cheeseburger at a cheap eatery, and then cocktails at a bar frequented by visionary thinkers. “I went to the White Horse Tavern looking for Dylan Thomas,” he said later at a concert, “but Dylan Thomas was dead.”
Around 3 a.m., the resident of #411 joined Leonard in Chelsea’s cramped, creaky elevator. Making small talk, Leonard asked Janis Joplin if she was looking for someone. The blues-rocker replied that she was looking for Kris Kristofferson. “Little lady, you’re in luck, I’m Kris Kristofferson,” he said, and later told an audience, “She never let on. Great generosity prevailed in those doom decades.”
The one-nighter inspired “Chelsea Hotel #2”:
“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street . . .”
7.
I discovered “Chelsea Morning” in the early 70s while living between white plaster walls in a third floor apartment adjacent to a noisy freeway in Los Angeles. Our elevator was decrepit, dimly lit, and saturated with secrets, much like I imagine the Chelsea elevator.
For too long, it was the only Joni Mitchell song I knew by heart. Her sky-bound voice summons mystery and engulfs the listener. Her vibrato extends effortlessly into her upper range with a stirring falsetto—hybrid harmonics and melodic rhythms that speak to me as much as her personal lyricism:
“Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning
and the first thing that I saw
Was the sun through yellow curtains
and a rainbow on the wall.”
I only recently discovered the inspiration behind the lyrics: Joni and a group of friends found fragments of stained glass on a street in Philadelphia. They used wire coat hangers to assemble pieces of art, which later hung in Joni’s apartment at the Chelsea. Sunlight from her window filtered through the mobile illuminating ‘a rainbow on the wall.’
"It was a very young and lovely time,” she said in an interview. “I think it's a very sweet song, but I don't think of it as part of my best work. To me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingénue."
8.
1967. Leonard and Joni, both born and raised in Canada, met for the first time backstage at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.
Joni, an impressionable twenty-four-year-old.
Leonard, thirty-three, and a Renaissance romantic.
In I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons, Joni Mitchell remarked on their early days together. “I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly. My work seemed very young and naïve in comparison.”
She asked Leonard what books he read and he loaned her Collected Poems by Lorca, The Stranger by Camus, and I Ching.
I can imagine Leonard and Joni entwined in one or the other’s Chelsea apartments—creating verbal images and magical riffs, sharing past pains and touching each other’s wounds. Their lyrics feel, never explain. They burrow deep inside and wake things up in a sort of rebirth.
9.
Leonard invited Joni to his childhood home in Montreal, a two-story brick house on tree-bordered Belmont Avenue. He stayed up all night watching his honey-haired girl while she slept.
Joni sketched his face on a map of Canada in her song “A Case of You”:
“On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh, Canada
With your face sketched on it twice …”
In Joni’s song “Rainy Night House” (released 1970) she sings about a ‘holy man’ who looks on while she sleeps:
“Upon her small white bed
I fell into a dream
You sat up all the night and watched me
To see, who in the world I might be …”
Leonard spent a month with Joni at her home on Lookout Mountain, a steep winding road in Laurel Canyon, an enclave of Los Angeles known for birthing finely drawn political songs from the mid-1960s to the early 1970’s.
10.
The two artists retreated at different points in their careers seeking a measure of peace.
Cohen spent five years in a cabin at Mount Baldy Zen Centre in the 1990s. “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” on the album “Ten New Songs” (2001), is one of many poems and songs written while studying Zen Buddhism at the centre.
From “A Thousand Kisses Deep”:
“And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life as if it’s real
A thousand kisses deep . . . ”
Joni retreated to the Canadian wilderness where she wrote, read, and painted by the beams of a kerosene lamp. “Getting back to my garden,” she said, a reference to her lyrics in “Woodstock” (1970):
“We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden . . .. ”
11.
Leonard and Joni remain parallel souls, transforming chaos and beauty into something absolute and mysterious. They were restless and longed to settle down, yet battled a desire to be free.
12.
2018. The door to Leonard’s apartment at the Chelsea sold at auction for $85,000; the same amount as Joni’s apartment door.
2020. Their poetry endures, a gateway to purpose, passion, and magic.
Sherry Shahan grows carrot tops in her windowsill for pesto. Her short stories, articles and essays have appeared in international magazines and literary journals. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught a creative writing course for UCLA Extension for 10 years.