Doors from the rooms of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell and more were purchased for thousands of dollars each.
Bob Dylan’s door went for $100,000 (around £70,000) alone, while the door to a room occupied by Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin during an affair that is rumoured to have inspired Cohen’s track Chelsea Hotel No. 2′ went for $85,000.
It was one of 50 doors from the hotel, where a host of stars stayed over the years, to be sold.
The door to a room used by singers Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen during an affair, as well as the singer Joni Mitchell, fetched $85,000.
A former tenant acquired the doors after renovation work began in 2011.The hotel, built in the 1880s, became a long-term residence for generations of singers, bohemians and writers.The hotel also served as a residence for writers Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe, and science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey there.
The most infamous incident to take place in the building came in 1978, when Sid Vicious from the UK punk band the Sex Pistols was charged with murder after Nancy Spungen was found stabbed to death in the room they shared. Vicious died of a heroin overdose before the case came to trial.
Andrew Rye, a Chelsea-born psychologist, lived in the Chelsea Hotel with his musician parents when he was a child in the 1980s. He remembers that time fondly, though the grown-ups at the hotel used to tell him that the rooms and corridors were haunted. “It was an extraordinary period,” he said. “Every evening you’d have a guitar player or a banjo player coming into our apartments and playing music.”
Another one-time resident, Elizabeth Pugh, a playwright, actor, and singer-songwriter, inspected a door to see if it belonged to her former apartment. She wasn’t sure. Her friends, Ed Hamilton, a writer, and Debbie Martin, a board member of the neighborhood preservation association Save Chelsea, currently live on the eighth floor at the hotel. “Our door is still on the hinges, ‘cause they haven’t thrown us out yet,” joked Hamilton.
