The Shabby Magnificence of the Chelsea Hotel

I part company with other critics in harboring a strong disregard for Grey Gardens, the plotless 1975 fly-on-the-wall documentary in which two bonkers old cat ladies natter about nothing in their upended-dumpster of a house for 90 punitively dull minutes. (Oh, they were related to Jackie Kennedy? Somehow, that still doesn’t make them interesting.)

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel aspires to be the Grey Gardens of Manhattan’s famously counterculture-friendly inn, and it succeeds too well. Directed by a pair of Belgians, Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, who eschew standard techniques such as identifying who is speaking or providing narration or other context, the film only glancingly refers to the Chelsea Hotel’s long history, which includes such frightful events as the murder of Nancy Spungeon by her punk boyfriend Sid Vicious and the photo shoot for Madonna’s book Sex.

Instead, the movie is mostly a dull series of slapdash portraits of eccentric, long-term residents, two of whom died before the film was released, who no longer feel welcome on the property but are determined not to be nudged out. In most cases, the filmmakers simply drop in on these residents so we can listen to them opine about whatever enters their mind. A big subject of discussion is ongoing construction work: A renovation project that took over a decade was still not nearly finished as the filmmakers went about their business. That work finally wrapped up only a few weeks ago, when the famously dilapidated hotel finally and sparklingly reopened to guests.

The residents offer their impressions about living in one of Manhattan’s most fabled buildings — one of them once lived in the Janis Joplin suite, and muses that he and the deceased rocker must have placed their toothbrushes in the same holder — but just as often, they simply chatter about their various ongoing photography or art projects. One of them carefully makes wonderful little wire sculptures of models who come to his apartment to sit for him. Another resident recalls the dances she used to choreograph in the building. It’s all unbearably sad to witness; everyone is lost in his own personal story in this place, more heavily burdened with the past than Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, but time ticks on and leaves them behind, marinating or perhaps dissolving in their memories.

One can easily understand why these old-timers are so stubborn about leaving: Even though the place was unpleasant to live in during that long renovation, rents were cheap. One couple notes that their flat costs them only $317 a month. Even a very modest apartment in the area is worth eight or ten times that much. Then there’s the pull of legend; Dylan Thomas spent some of his last days there, Leonard Cohen wrote a famous song about one of his stays. So did Joni Mitchell, whose “Chelsea Morning” would give Bill and Hillary Clinton an idea about what to name their daughter. Andy Warhol’s associates stayed at the hotel and inspired him to shoot scenes for his underground movie Chelsea Girls there. Rocker Patti Smith and her then-boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, lived together in the hotel in their youth.

Weaving in archival footage of many of these figures, who appear as wraiths projected on the building’s walls, the documentary seeks to create a feeling that the place is infested with ghosts, and one construction worker readily agrees that this is true. The film also suggests that the ancient and feeble people who now live in the Chelsea are, in a way, living ghosts — “remnants,” as one of them puts it, of a different age in New York City history, when the metropolis’s dangers and filth made it unattractive to deep-pocketed visitors, and real estate in the neighborhood was much less valuable. A previous hotel manager, the late Stanley Bard, went out of his way to create a Bohemian atmosphere by enticing artists, musicians, writers, and other creative types to live there for as long as they wanted. Why not? The place was a bit of a dump anyway, but its squalor was of the artsy, hence prestigious, variety.

Today, though, the hotel is worth many tens of millions of dollars, and its future lies in getting well-heeled tourists to spend big for proximity to all of those ghosts. The kooky oldsters who spent decades there, meanwhile, continue to go into that good night, whether their passages are gentle or otherwise.