Mark Twain stayed there. So did Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger.
Jack Kerouac lived there. So did Arthur Miller and Jackson Pollock.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe lived there together, in the same room.
Thomas Wolfe wrote “You Can’t Go Home Again” there. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” there.
Bob Dylan wrote songs there. Joni Mitchell and Jon Bon Jovi wrote songs about it.
Andy Warhol filmed what would become the “Chelsea Girls” movie there.
Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there.
The Museum of Modern Art was conceived there.
The Grateful Dead played a concert on the roof there.
Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spurgen to death there (probably).
The Hotel Chelsea, which everyone calls the Chelsea Hotel or just The Chelsea, at 222 W. 23rd Street, is essential to New York lore, art history, literature, rock and roll, the Beats, the Punks, Popular culture, and Western Civilization.
Tony Notarberardino moved into the Chelsea 1994. He’s lived there ever since. He began photographing the characters occupying the hotel two years later, a stunning archive which can be seen at ACA Galleries March 9 through April 13, 2024, during “Chelsea Hotel Portraits,” the first public presentation of Notarberardino’s black and white portraits of the extraordinary individuals drawn there.
Featured are the famous—Dee Dee Ramone and Debbie Harry—and the lesser known—Elias Jose Reramos, the hotel garbage collector along with staff from the hotel's El Quijote restaurant.
“They interested me as much as the famous people,” Notarberardino told Forbes.com. “I never thought the portrait was any better because they were famous.”
Fame was never the point. Their connection to The Chelsea was. Each one contributed something.
“You hear the classic stories about Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols, but there was a lot of interesting people staying here that never got any recognition, and some I photographed,” Notarberardino explained.
A word of warning. Many of the photographs are sexually explicit in nature. Mirroring The Chelsea.
“There was a lot of crazy shit going on,” Notarberardino said, stating the obvious. “The first floor was like a flop house, there’d be prostitutes working out of here. When the whole Sex Pistols thing went down (1978), this was a dodgy place. Even when I moved in in the early 90s, people were like, ‘what are you doing living in the Chelsea Hotel?’ We had strip clubs around here. There was an S&M club two doors down.”
That’s all changed now.
After long-time owner Stanley Bard–who cultivated the The Chelsea’s artsy, Boehemian, anything goes atmosphere–was ousted from ownership and management of the property in 2007, subsequent owners undertook a massive, messy, contentious series renovations costing tens of millions of dollars and lasting over a decade. Completed in 2022, the “new” Hotel Chelsea is a fancy Manhattan hotel with small rooms and expensive rates not unlike 100 others.
Notarberardino estimates roughly 25 holdout residents like himself who endured the renovation remain living among the tourists checking in and checking out.
“(I) had a good 16 years of the original Chelsea Hotel managed by the Bard family,” Notarberardino said. “Then it was sold and went through two or three owners before finally settling on the renovation you see now. Each time they sold the hotel, each owner didn't like what the previous owner did, so not only did we endure demolition once … it was like this ongoing nightmare to be honest. We didn't think it was ever going to be finished.”
Visit the Hotel Chelsea today–looky loos are welcome to wander the lobby admiring the art collection and vintage staircase–and you’ll find Lobby Bar and Café Chelsea, both among the most fashionable in town. They are designed to look original, authentic; neither are.
“As much as we long for the nostalgia, it’s nice living in the hotel now; it’s impressive,” Notarberardino admits. “I’m living in a 5-star hotel. Room service when I moved in, they gave you the number of the deli that would deliver 24-hours.”
El Quijote restaurant just off the lobby is original, but much smaller than it used to be. Lobby Bar took up much of the original footprint. The public is welcome to enjoy all three.
Love At First Sight
Notarberardino was in his early 30s when he came to New York and The Chelsea from Australia. He had a friend living there. The friend suggested he see if any rooms were available.
“212-243-3700, I’ll never forget it, it’s the number of the Chelsea,” Notarberardino remembers. “I called in from Sydney before I left and they (answered), ‘Chelsea Hotel.’ I thought I had the wrong number. I hung up and called back and I'm like, ‘I'm looking for so and so,’ and they sent me straight to his room. I'm like, ‘yo, man, what do you do in a hotel; how does that work?’ He’s like, ‘that's a long story.’”
Notarberardino had heard of the hotel like everyone else, but didn’t come to New York intentionally to stay there.
“When I arrived, I got my own room and I thought, well, this is okay, because they're offering long term, short term, overnight, I thought, well, I really don't know where to go so I did a deal with Stanley Bard (who) gave me this room,” Notarberardino said. “This was the first room I walked into New York City, and I never left.”
That “deal” included $1100 a month for rent, “which I thought was expensive,” Notarberardino recalls. “It probably was. Fast forward and (rent) hasn’t really changed. This apartment anywhere in Chelsea (now) would be worth $5,000 for sure.”
Stanley Bard would accept art in lieu of cash for rent. Andy Warhol gave him paintings to cover expenses of Factory members staying there.
“You need people like that. Stanley was really sympathetic to artists. He helped me out in the early days because I didn’t have any money. He let the rent slide here and there. He wouldn’t hassle you if you explained the situation,” Notarberardino said. “That helped me be able to stay here because otherwise I probably would’ve moved, and certainly, if I didn’t have this room, I wouldn’t be in New York. There’s no way. This is a magical place and it suits me.”
Love at first sight.
“It completely changed my life,” he says of the apartment. “I just felt like I was home. Immediately.” The photographer has a classic, corner double unit. The spacious living room includes a fireplace and ceilings over 10-feet high. There’s a large bedroom with a big closet and a small kitchen.
His home’s vintage wood floors are cracked with big chunks gone. Original 1880s woodwork surrounds the windows. It’s dark and ornate with rugs, candles, velvet, mannequin forms, a large Buddhist figure, and white cat occupying the space. Empty picture frames and old mirrors cover the walls. Carnival masks, books, a catch-all of antiques and eclectic bric-a-brac adorn every surface. The bedroom ceiling is painted cerulean blue with yellow and red starbursts.
Bossa nova and jazz along popular music from the 20s through the 60s plays in the background. It’s a vibe.
The spectacular front door lets passersby know this isn’t one of the hotel rooms.
It was here, in the apartment’s hallway, where all of the portraits in Notarberardino’s series–some 1500–were taken using a vintage 1960s Toyo-View 810GII camera. The old-timey kind that stands chest high on a tripod and produces 8x10 negatives.
“I had to talk them into coming into my room. You’re coming home at night, I'd see someone interesting sitting in the lobby–two, three in the morning–you go up to them and give them the, ‘hey, you want to come up to my apartment,’” Notarberardino said. “If you approach it the right way, and I found a way of doing that, I’d get a lot of ‘no’s,’ but I'd get some ‘yes’s’ too. Then, of course, the other tenants who I'd have to get to know because some people are private; some portraits took me 10 years to get.”
The Chelsea Hotel Today
The Chelsea’s Bohemian feel is a thing of the past. Fleeting whiffs tingle the senses, but it’s a business now. The upside is no one’s scoring heroin there or being carried out in a body bag.
The hotel mirrors how the entire city has cleaned up its act over the past half century.
“If you saw pictures of the West Side Highway in the 70s, it looked like a wasteland … like Beruit,” Notarberardino said. “It's hard to imagine 42nd Street was a red-light district, now its Disneyland. It literally was, shows like ‘Midnight Cowboy’ and all of those were shot around there. A lot of the people living (in The Chelsea) would be frequenting that.”
The Chelsea’s painters, poets, drag queens and junkies have been mostly replaced by tourists. Notarberardino counts himself among the last of a century’s worth of creatives to take inspiration there.
“I guess I’m a part of that legacy now, but I never thought I would be,” he said. “That was never my intention. (The photographs are) just another body of artwork that came out of here.”
An astonishing volume of books and plays and songs and paintings and, now, photographs. All produced at The Chelsea, and in some ways, produced by The Chelsea.
“Where that came from, I didn't know; I always thought that The Chelsea was on a vortex, some vortex that defied time,” Notarberardino guesses about the creativity inspired there. “You can certainly feel the energy. Such a creative energy. What this building contributed to the art world is phenomenal.”
Does he ever think about leaving?
“If I didn't have this place? Yeah,” he said. “This is kind of a magic portal. I can't walk away from this. Especially now, it’s my home.”
Notarberardino has a pair of daughters who grew up in the hotel he hopes to pass his apartment on to.
