Chelsea Hotel NYC

PattiSmith’s poetical book #JustKids summons the mood #1970s

“Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here ….”

#BobDylan #CharlesBukowski #LeonardCohen #VincentGallo #DennisHopper #JanisJoplin #StanleyKubrick #UmaThurman #ArthurCClarke #JackKerouac #AllenGinsberg #GregoryCorso #Madonna #SidVicious

Featuring scenes from the Chelsea Hotel, Mercer St and Soho, New York.


Insightful tender film previewed at the ICA London January 19th 2023

Dreaming Walls, dir. Amélie van Elmbt & Maya Duverdier, Belgium / France / USA / Netherlands / Sweden 2022, 80 min.

The legendary Chelsea Hotel is an icon of 1960s counterculture. Former residents and regulars have included Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe and the superstars of Warhol’s factory – an artists’ refuge for over a century. And it will soon reopen as a luxury hotel.

Caught between fear and frenzy, after eight years of construction and living with scaffolding and constant building, some 51 residents prepare for imminent upheaval as others protest or hole up in their rooms. Against this chaotic backdrop, the film explores the utopian origins that contributed to the Chelsea’s mythical stature and questions the challenges it confronts in the future, as its residents, sold to capitalism, and walls themselves face a turning point in their common history.

The screening was followed by an Q&A with artist Rose Cory (https://rosecory.com/about-rose-cory/) who lived there and filmmakers Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier


portrait: Rose Wood, New York City, 2012. Photo by Dietmar Busse.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/03/they-are-holding-on-to-a-dream-the-last-bohemians-at-new-yorks-chelsea-hotel

https://releasing.dogwoof.com/blogs/hightlights-dreamingwallsica