by Sarah Vowell
When I tell journalist Lance Loud, a former Chelsea denizen, about the wrapper on the floor, he laughs the guffaw of recognition: “As opposed to most hotels where they go around and clean the rooms, I’m sure the [Chelsea] maids go around from room to room and leave the used condoms and wrinkle up the sheets and blow their noses on the washcloths just so you know that that price you’re paying is for genuine, New York circa-the-sixties cachet, no matter how germ-ridden it might be.”
Loud, who has the distinction of being one of the first persons to come out on national television, moved to the Chelsea in 1971. It was during the filming of An American Family, a proto–Real World PBS documentary series which followed Lance’s Santa Barbara family for a year. The first episode shows an under-the-weather Lance phoning home from his “crummy pad in New York” at the Chelsea, asking his sister to “send me my scarves.”
“My first contact with the Chelsea Hotel,” he recalls, “was as a rabid teenager from suburban southern California who was reading anything he could about the strange and exotic state of mind called Andy Warhol, which seemed so anarchic and so far away and so contrary to everything I knew.” Then he saw Warhol’s film The Chelsea Girls, a split-screen, three-and-a-half-hour bore/smut fest, which shows things like Ondine shooting speed and Nico in tears. Its poster, a nude woman-as-hotel in which the Chelsea’s entrance is situated at her vagina, was like some exotic travel brochure to Lance Loud. To him, it was his dream destination: “Some people want to go to Valhalla. Some people want to go to El Dorado or Shangri-La. When I was a teenager, I wanted to end up at the Chelsea Hotel. With or without a needle in my arm and lipstick on my face.” He arrived at the hotel as the kept companion of a psychotic drug addict. Who says dreams can’t come true?
“I was terrified,” Loud recalls. “It’s one thing to dream about this Gothic mansion of debauchery,” he says. “But it’s another thing for a fairly innocent young urchin from the suburbs to come and actually stay there.” He’s grateful for the experience: “I don’t want to be a bummer about it. You got the feeling that it was full of a lot of disembodied people who were on the road to some other reality. Purgatory is a cathartic thing. The best parts of life sometimes are kill or cure.”
Actually, though Loud’s tale is almost comically grim, it does get to the heart of the Chelsea’s noir appeal. The Chelsea isn’t so much a hotel as a hideout, a refuge, a hospice. It is said that Loud’s then neighbor Patti Smith ended up here, cradling an ill Robert Mapplethorpe in her arms, because she could think of nowhere else to go, could imagine no other sanctuary in New York for a couple of down-and-out oddballs who, like so many, happened to have big dreams but no money, hoping that the Chelsea would take them in. Stanley Bard welcomed them: “I liked them. They were nice, honest people who came to me and said they had no money and someday they would. Would I trust them and go along with them? Yes.”
Who doesn’t crave a little refuge (or a loan) at least once in life, especially when you’re young and broke, or old and broke, or moving up, or slipping away? People don’t always need, don’t always want, a clean well-lighted place. As an outsider passing through, the Chelsea felt like a lonely place, solitary and sad. But the nice thing about loneliness (and solitude and sadness) is the silence. The Chelsea is a very quiet place to think. And this could be its secret, its attraction for those with poems and pictures rattling round their heads. It is an oasis of hush in one the noisiest cities on earth. And the silence isn’t just spiritual—it’s real, technological; the Chelsea has the thickest of walls. In fact, one of my neighbors during my stay was English comedian Eddie Izzard, in town doing his one-man show Dress to Kill. In it, he had a bit about how he loved the hotel’s dense walls because he could scream all he wanted at his computer, said he sat in his room every night yelling, “Log on! Log on! Log on! LOG ON!” No one ever heard a peep.
Arthur Miller, for a while, evidently found the less-than-sanitary site cathartic. “The Chelsea,” he wrote, “for all its irritants—the ageold dust in its drapes and carpets [corroboration!], the rusting pipes, the leaking refrigerator, the air conditioner into which you had to keep pouring pitchers of water—was an impromptu, healing ruin.”
There is one man who has given a lot of thought to renovating the ruin—Stanley Bard’s son David. Like his father, David hopes to pass the hotel on to his children. Unlike his father, he’s caught in the middle between the place’s past and tourism’s future. A handsome, soft-spoken man in his thirties, David Bard is not unaware of the Chelsea’s facilities (or lack thereof). This is a person who knows full well other hotels this size offer little bottles of shampoo, for instance. Or room service. Or minibars. This is the person responsible for the new phone system, for cable TV.
It is doubtful that even the shiniest of gadgets thoughtfully plopped into the hotel’s rooms will outshine the glare of its grandly sad stories. This fact alone might prevent the kind of bourgeois, Disney-fired renovation taking place a few blocks north in Times Square. When I ask David Bard if he even thinks it’s possible to Disney up Dylan Thomas, all he does is laugh. “No. Or Mapplethorpe.” That kind of revamp would turn the sad stories merely sick. What would there be? A Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Nightclub? Would there be an Arthur Miller–themed Death of a Salesman Business Center, equipped with computers and fax machines? A Sid and Nancy Honeymoon Suite?
In fact, what happened to Sid and Nancy’s room is a testament to how the Bards have dealt with the darker side that sometimes comes with the territory. Stanley Bard effectively destroyed Room 100 as an act of honor. He says of the killing, “Unfortunately we have to accept it. It’s history and it did happen. I did not want it to become a legend for that reason. So we incorporated it into a large apartment which is now quite lovely. A very nice artist is living in that apartment.” And so the Bard family receives a few measly bucks from a nice artist instead of raking in the tourist dollars of rubbernecking necros.
And if young David Bard gets his way, major makeovers won’t be happening any time soon. Sitting in front of a shelf that contains one of my college art history textbooks, David talks about his early, more difficult years at the hotel. “When I first got out of college,” he remembers, “I had this idea of literally gutting the building and renovating it and making everything clean corners, like a modern situation.” How alluring. How un-Chelsea. “A couple of the artists in the building, they said to me, ‘David, you don’t want to get rid of the cracks and the crevices in the building because that’s where the ghosts hide. And if you get rid of the ghosts, the Chelsea will just be any other building.’ ”
Michigan and Wacker
I HAD THIS THEORY, A Chicago theory. After four years of walking back and forth across the Michigan Avenue Bridge, I had accumulated a few random facts about the bridge that coalesced into an actual hypothesis. Namely, that I could tell the whole history of America standing on that bridge. I thought I might be able to swivel around and point at the whole dark, inspiring tale. I had the following tidbits to go on: a couple of French explorers who, a plaque on the bridge said, passed by in 1673; an Indian massacre in 1812 right there in front of the Burger King; and vague notions of Abe Lincoln’s debt to the Chicago Tribune, whose quaint Gothic tower looms over the bridge’s north side. As any journalist knows, three instances is enough to establish a story, if not an actual trend, so I thought that’s enough American history, and I could just make up the rest.
It turns out my theory was only too right. The intersection of Michigan and Wacker, I found out, isn’t just a corner, it’s a vortex. The deeper I dug into the history of Chicago and its relationship to the history of the country, the more crowded the ghost traffic jam clogging up the Michigan Avenue Bridge got.
The beaux arts–style bridge was constructed in 1920. Standing on it, the Chicago River flows underneath. Looking east, it isn’t far from where the river meets Lake Michigan. (The river used to flow into the lake, but in 1900, engineers reversed its flow to keep the city�
�s sewage from being deposited into its drinking water. Now the sewage eventually flows into the Mississippi, which is appreciated in Chicago, but met with less enthusiasm downriver in St. Louis.) Looking south, the bridge hits land at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, where Chicagoans may purchase chocolate or eyeglasses. The view to the north is picture-postcard pretty, especially at night, when the white wedding cake of the Wrigley Building glows so soft you’d swear it’s candlelit. Supposedly pictures of the building so delighted Joseph Stalin that the University of Moscow was designed in its image. And who can blame him, at least for that? In short, a 360-degree glance from the bridge offers the most dignified panorama in all Chicago. But under the Wacker Drive sidewalk, there’s some very old blood seeping into the river.
The American national mythology revolves around the idea that the promise of America is best seen in the West—wide open spaces, don’t fence me in, home, home on the range, etc. Metaphorically, that might be true. But economically, the real place to witness the promise of America is the Midwest, where, for most of this country’s history, the products of the range were manipulated for fun and profit. When the cowboys serenaded their stray calves to “Git Along, Little Dogies,” they left out the part where the little dogie is railroaded to Chicago to be slaughtered by some underpaid, overworked immigrant, en route to its manifest destiny as a New Yorker’s supper.
The first person to grasp the significance of this place where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan was Louis Joliet. Joliet was a twenty-seven-year-old fur trader who accompanied a Jesuit missionary named Jacques Marquette on a canoe expedition from Quebec in 1673. They were to map the Mississippi in the name of France, unaware that Spain had already claimed the river some 130 years before. On the return trip, at the suggestion of their Indian guide, they traveled from the Mississippi into the Illinois River, and then the Des Plaines. They got out and carried their canoes a few dozen miles to the Chicago River, where they got back in their canoes and paddled to this spot where the river meets the Great Lake—just below the corner at Michigan and Wacker.
And Joliet then had a vision. His map of North America, an oddly pretty, delicate ink drawing he made in 1674, is concerned with one thing, and one thing only—water. His America is all Great Lakes and Mississippi. Look close and you can see what he saw: From Lake Michigan, there is only one point—the future site of Chicago—that connects to a river that connects to a couple of other rivers that could connect it to the Mississippi. This is what Joliet knew, that this place is a continental hub, the missing link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, and thus the Atlantic and the Gulf. All that was needed was a short canal spanning the miles of prairie between rivers. He wrote, “We could go with facility to Florida in a bark, and by very easy navigation.” Thus Joliet’s map isn’t so much a map as a prophecy: Stick your ear up against it and you can practically hear cash registers ring.
I like to picture Joliet sometimes, walking up or down Michigan Avenue to the bridge, a go-cup in his hand from either the Starbucks on the south side of the bridge or the Starbucks on the north side, spitting coffee-laced saliva into the Chicago River, knowing it’ll float—with facility—all the way past New Orleans and to the ocean from there.
The first person to get cracking on Joliet’s dream was Chicago’s first permanent settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a trader who moved to the north side of the river in 1779. That was in the middle of the American Revolution, and a century after Joliet paddled by. Du Sable’s mother was an African slave and his father was French. He was born in the Caribbean, on the island of Hispaniola. Which connects the land around the Michigan Avenue Bridge all the way back to Columbus. Hispaniola, much to the dismay of its inhabitants, happened to be the place where Christopher Columbus dropped off forty of his Spanish raper/pillagers on Christmas Eve 1492 as he headed back for Spain, where he reported that the people he called Indians “had very good faces” but “could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes.” Of course, certain settlers at Michigan and Wacker who met death by tomahawk in 1812 might have begged to differ with that assessment.
Du Sable built a small wood cabin on what is now the site of a thirty-five-story office tower called the Equitable Building. With his Potawatomi wife, Catherine, du Sable’s marriage bed was itself a map of America—the mixing of European, African, and Indian blood to make a son and a daughter, true American children with three continents in their dark eyes.
Chicago schoolteachers like to impress upon their students that Chicago’s first resident, du Sable, was a black man. And just think, it only took 204 years for the town to elect its first black mayor.
The United States declared war on Great Britain in June of 1812, partly because of boundary issues here in the Old Northwest, though the news didn’t reach Fort Dearborn until mid-July. Just as the soldiers and their families were evacuating the fort on August 15, hundreds of Potawatomi Indians descended upon them and killed them, burning down the fort. Today, the site of the fort is weirdly commemorated with little bronze markers embedded in the sidewalk at Michigan and Wacker, so that the tourists may dance around its former perimeter as if learning to cha-cha-cha. A wildly racist relief sculpture on the southeast corner of the bridge depicts the defense of Fort Dearborn. A soldier from the fort is battling off a savage Indian brave while a mother and child are cowering behind him, basically waiting to die. And underneath that is a plaque that says the people of the fort “were brutally massacred by the Indians. They will be cherished as martyrs in our early history.” What it doesn’t say is that those Indians had not technically ceded their rights to this land and they were allied with the British in a war declared by the United States, but it looks like the city ran out of room to put that on the plaque. When soldiers arrived to rebuild the fort, they first had to bury the scalped human remains, which still lay there.
Walking back onto the bridge, if you look downriver a few blocks west, you can see the site of the old Sauganash Hotel. During the first half of the nineteenth century, at the Sauganash, Chicagoans seemed to be playacting the juiciest bits of the country’s spanking-new Constitution every night. In his book City of the Century, historian Donald L. Miller writes: “At the Sauganash and its neighboring hotels, men and women of every color and class were welcome; and whiskey, song, and dance were the great democratizers. Visitors from more civilized parts were shocked to see Indian braves spinning the white wives of fort officers around the dance floor of the Sauganash to the frenzied fiddling and toe tapping of [hotel owner] Mark Beaubien, or Indian and white women drinking home-distilled liquor straight from the bottle. To add an edge to the evenings, local white traders . . . would put on feathered headdresses and spring into the crowded tavern with war whoops and raised tomahawks, scaring the wits out of tight-buttoned easterners.”
Could there be a more lovable historical yarn than that? That anecdote is endearing, not just as a metaphor for the best American ideals—the picture of liquored-up ladies and dancing Indians, the strangeness of reenacting the Fort Dearborn massacre to scare the queasy Easterners, turning what must have still been an open wound into a practical joke. That story is proof of the theorem that then as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.
The festivities were brief. The ladies of Chicago wouldn’t be dancing with Indians much longer because there wouldn’t be any Indians left to dance with. The City of Chicago was officially incorporated in 1833, the year the Potawatomi chiefs stood near the site where the Equitable Building stands today and signed away their land in Illinois to the administration of Andrew Jackson, who found time in his busy schedule of relocating the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole to have the Potawatomi removed west to what U.S. government surveyors had called land “too poor for snakes to live upon.”
Three years after the Potawatomi signed away their land and the city was incorporated, construction began on that canal that Jol
iet had envisioned a century and a half before, to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. The Illinois and Michigan Canal took twelve years to build, dug almost entirely by hand, mostly by Irish immigrants, who crossed an ocean and the prairie for the privilege of keeling over with a shovel in their hands. They did not die in vain. The canal worked pretty much exactly as Joliet imagined. So much trade moved past this corner that Chicago expanded from a muddy little hamlet of a few hundred people to city of over a hundred thousand in just twenty-five years.
Thanks in part to one particular innovation born next to the Michigan Avenue Bridge, Chicago was not the only city in America to experience a population boom in the last half of the nineteenth century. Cyrus McCormick built his McCormick Reaper Works right here on the river in 1847. His machine, the reaper, turned out to be one of the most significant inventions in the history of history. Before McCormick it took three hours to gather a bushel of wheat, and with the reaper it took ten minutes.
Because McCormick helped mechanize agriculture, farms could use less labor in less time and produce more crops on more land. By speeding up and emptying out the country, McCormick populated the city. Not that the march of progress is necessarily benign, especially if you’re one of those urban workers—just ask the dead of the Haymarket riot who laid down their lives just fifteen blocks from here for the eight-hour workday, or read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about what the meatpackers went through on the South Side, or listen to the words of Cyrus McCormick himself, who, along with merchant Marshall Field, secretly bought Gatling guns for the Illinois National Guard in case of “what danger, if any, was to be anticipated from the communistic element of the city.”
By the Civil War, most of America’s grain from the West and the vast prairie around Chicago was unloaded from trains here, traded on the commodities exchange, and then sent east on ships from Lake Michigan, all within a five-minute walk of the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive. It could have been this very spot the poet Carl Sandburg was thinking of in his famous poem “Chicago.” He called the city “Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.” The reaper works on the north side of the river was the Tool Maker. The Stacker of Wheat was in the giant grain silos on the south side of the river where the giant Hyatt Hotel stands. The Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler was over on the train tracks next to the silos. And you can spot the big shoulders attached to roughly nine out of ten men walking by.
