We here at Dangerous Minds have written about a LOT of peculiar and astonishing auctions. Just from memory: Elvis’ pill bottles (twice), Marilyn Monroe’s hair and her pelvic x-rays (separately), John Lennon’s school detention records, a motorcycle from Easy Rider, a guitar destroyed by a member of the Misfits, claymation figures from a Zappa video, Alice Cooper’s prop guillotine, the actual Maltese Falcon… The list goes on for quite a while, but we may have reached the apotheosis or nadir of weird specificity today: coming up for exhibit and auction next month are celebrity apartment doors.

The Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues is one of the great landmarks of New York City’s rapidly disappearing Bohemian culture. Built and opened as a co-op in 1884, and re-opened as a hotel in 1905, it has served both short and long-term residents, and its register of long-timers is basically an absurdly long list of incredibly accomplished people in the worlds of letters (Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, basically all of the beats), music (Iggy Pop, Cher, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, and the Chelsea Girl herself, Nico), and visual art (Robert Mapplethorpe, Diego Rivera, Robert Crumb). Madonna photographed her infamous Sex book there. Sid (maybe) killed Nancy there. Andy Warhol famously made a really long, formally experimental film about its residents, and if you get a chance to see it screened as was intended do not pass it up.

There’s a Jon Bon Jovi song about it too. Can’t win ‘em all.

Even if seemingly everyone who’d ever been awesome in the 20th Century hadn’t lived there, it’d be an architectural treasure, and it’s been closed (except to long-term residents, obviously) for several years for long-needed renovations; it’s supposed to re-open later this year. Those years of renovation are where we come around to the forthcoming auction: specific doors known to have belonged on the rooms of various notables are going on exhibit on April 5th at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery (529 W. 20th, so basically a stone’s throw away from their original home), and they’ll be auctioned off by Guernsey’s on April 12th. Doors verified to specific individuals so far include those of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Janis Joplin, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe,  Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. More may be identified as research into the doors’ provenance continues, according to Guernsey’s:

Through exhaustive research, roughly half of these large wooden doors can be traced to the iconic individuals who lived behind them. And although the research is continuing, it is expected that some doors can only be confirmed to be from the Hotel without a more precise personal connection. But even in those cases, owning a piece of Chelsea history is significant. Indeed, behind these doors lived the talented and famous (and infamous like Sid Vicious), where the Hotel served as home, workplace, artist’s retreat, hideaway, and love nest for the hippest, most talented, and most outrageous.

The doors are being consigned by one Mr. Jim Georgiou, a one-time Chelsea resident who took it upon himself to rescue the artifacts. Per his instruction, a portion of the proceeds from the auction will benefit City Harvest, a pioneering food-rescue non-profit (Mr. Georgiou himself once suffered a period of homelessness and hunger). If the prospect of owning a hero’s apartment door appeals to you but you can’t be in New York on April 12th, absentee bidding will be conducted on liveauctioneers.com and invaluable.com. Good luck to all who plan to bid.
 

Andy Warhol
 

Humphrey Bogart
 

Bob Marley
 
More doors after the jump…

The wild movie poster by famed illustrator Alan Aldridge

From the Dangerous Minds archive:

Chelsea Girls was Andy Warhol’s first “commercial” success as a filmmaker. Co-directed by Warhol and Paul Morrissey, the film consists of twelve improvised vignettes (two were semi-scripted by playwright Ronald Tavel) featuring the druggy, draggy, seemingly morally-bankrupt freaks who constituted Warhol’s entourage and inner circle.

The film was shot in summer and fall of 1966 in the Hotel Chelsea, at Warhol’s “Factory” studio and in the apartment where the Velvet Underground lived on 3rd Street. Brigid Berlin (“The Duchess”), Nico, Mario Montez, Ondine (“The Pope”), Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet, Rene Richard, Eric Emerson, Gerard Malanga, filmmaker Marie Menken, Ari Boulogne (Nico’s son) a gorgeous young Mary Woronov—who danced with the Velvet Underground as part of “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable”—and others are seen in the film’s three and a quarter-hour running time (the film un-spooled on 12 separate reels). Most cast members are listed by their own names as they were essentially playing themselves.

Chelsea Girls was booked into a prestigious 600 seat uptown theater in New York and actually distributed to theaters across the country. In 1966, it’s unlikely that middle America had any idea that people like this even existed. Cinema-goers in Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, San Diego and yes, even, Kansas City probably got their first exposure to actual drug addicts, yammering speed-freak narcissists, homosexuals, drag queens and a dominatrix when they watched Chelsea Girls. To Warhol’s delight, the film was even raided by the vice squad in Boston. The theater manager was arrested and later fined $2000 when a judge found him guilty of four charges of obscenity.

Movie critic Rex Reed said “Chelsea Girls is a three and a half hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the inside of a toilet bowl.”

Tell us how you really feel, Rex!

The film was presented as a split screen, running simultaneously on two projectors with alternating soundtracks. It was a mixture of B&W and color footage. Edie Sedgwick’s vignette was removed from Chelsea Girls at her insistence, but was later known as “The Apartment.” A section originally screened with Chelsea Girls called “The Closet” (about two “children” who lived in one, with Nico and Randy Bourscheidt) was cut and later shown as a separate film.
 

 
A young Roger Ebert reviewed it for The Chicago Sun-Times:

For what we have here is 3 1/2 hours of split-screen improvisation poorly photographed, hardly edited at all, employing perversion and sensation like chili sauce to disguise the aroma of the meal. Warhol has nothing to say and no technique to say it with. He simply wants to make movies, and he does: hours and hours of them. If “Chelsea Girls” had been the work of Joe Schultz of Chicago, even Warhol might have found it merely pathetic.

The key to understanding “Chelsea Girls,” and so many other products of the New York underground, is to realize that it depends upon a cult for its initial acceptance, and upon a great many provincial cult-aspirers for its commercial appeal. Because Warhol has become a social lion and the darling of the fashionable magazines, there are a great many otherwise sensible people in New York who are hesitant to bring their critical taste to bear upon his work. They make allowances for Andy that they wouldn’t make for just anybody, because Andy has his own bag and they don’t understand it but they think they should

.

Ebert hits the nail squarely on the head. Chelsea Girls is actually a fucking terrible “movie.” If you view it as “art” or even as an important cultural artifact of the Sixties (it’s both) then you can give it a pass, and should, but if you’re expecting to be “entertained,” you need to re-calibrate your expectations. Only a few parts of the film are actually engaging (Ondine’s speed-freak monologues; Brigid Berlin poking herself with speed; the “Hanoi Hannah” section with Mary Woronov) the rest of it is… boring.

It looks good and parts of it are “interesting” because you can only hear what’s happening on one side of the split screen and so the silent side becomes somehow more intriguing, but, oh yeah, this is a boring thing to watch. It’s still cool, but yeah it’s boring, if that makes any sense.

Chelsea Girls has been next to impossible to see since its original releaseat least until it got uploaded to YouTube—usually screening just a few times a year around the globe. I caught it myself in the (appropriately) sleazy surroundings of London’s legendary Scala Cinema in 1984. There were probably six people there, including me. I admit to falling asleep for a bit of it, but I think everyone probably does.
 

 
This video comes from an Italian DVD that was given a very limited released in 2003. Probably the best way to watch this is to hook your computer to your flatscreen and do something else, sort of half paying attention, while Chelsea Girls is on in the background.
 

 
These photographs of the legendary Chelsea Hotel, an epicenter of New York City’s cultural life for decades, as it undergoes a potentially soul-destroying transformation, look like stills from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as re-imagined by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Spooky, creepy and very sad.

From an article in Gothamist:

The landmarked hotel has been undergoing changes that no one seems to support (no one that doesn’t currently have stake in it)—residents have been practically forced out, rooms have been gutted, and a rooftop bar may soon be coming to the gorgeous oasis above 23rd Street, which is still home to a handful of people. (Yes, people live on the roof.)

Click through for what our photographer Sam Horine saw while inside—he tells us, “the vibe was depressing—very dark and dusty in the hallways… all the doors had plastic over them to keep out the dust. You could tell that the management had just quit doing anything for the long term residents a long time ago in an effort to encourage them to leave.” A security guard came along soon after and told him he could only go to the one room that he signed in to visit, and escorted him back there.”

Behind every chained and padlocked door: a story.
 

 

 
See more photos at Gothamist.

Thank you Mirgun.

Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern, Chelsea Hotel
 
1981 BBC documentary on the Chelsea Hotel and its legendary inhabitants. This is good stuff. Includes footage of Quentin Crisp, Nico (backed up on guitar by my old friend Joe Bidewell), Warhol, Burroughs, Viva, Jobriath (2 years before he died of AIDS), Chelsea manager Stanley Bard and more.

I used to sit in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel just to soak up the vibes. Here’s your chance to do the same. Enjoy.
 

 
More after the jump…