Hotel Chelsea: The Way It Was 2006

Dreaming Walls, the new Martin Scorsese-sponsored documentary, paints a bleak picture of New York’s Hotel Chelsea, depicting a decade of hell for its longtime residents while projecting on its walls the ghosts of the famous and infamous who made music, art, loved, lived and died there.
But I have a different story, anything but bleak, about when I stayed there in 2006, a year before Stanley Bard, whose family had run the Chelsea for seventy years, was kicked out by a shareholder, triggering the hotel's downward spiral. I got to know Stanley, who shared stories about the hotel and his lifelong ambition to gradually remodel it and preserve its eclectic community. Alas, that did not happen and after years of turmoil, Hotel Chelsea has been remodeled and reopened as a boutique hotel.