The end of an era at the Chelsea

It is the usual hurly-burly in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, a sense of benign chaos, with guests and long-time residents navigating the hodge-podge of ageing furniture, the jarring conglomeration of artworks staring from the yellow-painted walls and the papier-mâché woman dangling from the ceiling on a swing. The old geysers at the front desk are more or less alert, nodding to those they know, ignoring all others.

This morning, there is something less comfortable in the air. No one should be more at home here than Stanley Bard, who has managed the hotel for 50 years, latterly with his son David and daughter Michelle. But he is unsettled, pacing in and out of his office, surveying his terrain with suspicion. One group of visitors interests him. They are not as welcome as everyone else.

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Mr Bard, spectacles hanging from a string around his neck, has had a very bad week. News came in a telephone call last Thursday evening - his 73rd birthday, no less - that colleagues on the board were summarily ousting him from his job. Worse, they were importing an outside team of boutique managers to take over the hotel. These are the gentlemen he sees nosing around today.

"I am not supposed to go behind the front desk, but I am going to," he whispers in a tone of cautious defiance as he offers to take a reporter to Room 711, where Arthur Miller worked on turning his 1955 play A View from the Bridge into an operetta. Safely on the seventh floor, he proudly shows off the suite that has recently been renovated to convey a least something approaching contemporary chic. He wants the world to know he doesn't need outsiders to teach him how to upgrade his beloved property.

But others have, for some time, begged to differ and now it is too late for Stanley and his children - Michelle oversaw the refurbishment of 711 herself - to prove themselves. The boardroom coup, it seems, is complete, which is why barely half an hour later the new management blood - Ira Drucker and Andre Balazs, both highly prominent hotel developers in the city - also find themselves taking a tour of Number 711. And while they try to remain polite, they cannot quite hide the wince in their eyes.

The removal of Stanley has been a long time coming. It was his father, David also, who bought the 12-storey brick pile on West 23rd Street in Chelsea, with elaborate wrought-iron balcony railings, in 1940. Originally built in 1883 as an apartment building (it remained the tallest building in New York until 1902), it had been turned into a hotel after the turn of the century.

But the first David Bard did not buy it alone but in partnership with two other gentlemen named Krauss and Gross. And therein was one of the problems. It was a fight between the heirs of all three clans over control and share ownership that reached the courts and eventually led to a defeat for Stanley that has brought him and the hotel to this pass. Then there is something called changing times. In its present state, the Chelsea Hotel is not for everyone, and it's not just because of the diffident service at the front desk, where, according to one recent guest, even conjuring a roll of toilet paper can be a major undertaking. The place itself, in a prime location close to West Chelsea's burgeoning art gallery district, is in charming, but obvious physical disrepair. No ambitious hotelier could walk in without feeling an urgent desire to give it some love.

But there is much more to the Chelsea Hotel, of course. It is unique in a town peppered with corporate hostelries and overrun in recent years with so-called boutique hotels that offer increasingly tiresome elements of over-design - all the way down the de rigueur buttoned black suits of the cat-walk bellboys - in exchange for exorbitant rates and rooms barely big enough to swing a Blackberry. The Chelsea is an outback of bohemia, a treasured throwback to times when personality came before profit.

The special atmosphere of the place is mostly about the artistic community it has fostered through many decades. Most of its long-term residents, who occupy about 60 per cent of the rooms, are in the creative world. And they share the long, butter-coloured corridors, with some truly distinguished ghosts.

In Britain, we know it best, perhaps, as the place that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols was arrested after his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen - "Nauseating Nancy" - was found dead from a stab wound on the floor of Room 100 in 1978. But the list of famous and infamous former residents is as long as a Broadway show-bill.

Miller lived here for several years in the 1960s with his young daughter. Dylan Thomas drank 18 glasses of whisky in succession in his room before falling into a coma and dying in nearby St Vincent's Hospital. Thomas Wolfe took shelter here to write You Can't Go Home. Other writers who favoured the Chelsea Hotel over the generations include William Burroughs and Mark Twain. Its roster of singers runs from Leonard Cohen, whose "Chelsea Hotel" was written here for Janis Joplin, to Jimi Hendrix, who mesmerised fellow guests by rehearsing here.

If the Chelsea Hotel has survived less as a place to sleep and more as a cultural institution, the credit goes to the Bard family, which has been known to let struggling artists fall behind on their rent rather than throw them out, or take pieces of artwork in lieu for cash payments. No wonder that the takeover this week by the boutique boys is raising a storm of handwringing and protest from residents, former residents and anyone else in New York who fears for the death of a last bastion of creativity.

"Potentially, this is a thing of great despair," Scott Griffin, a producer who last year worked with Kevin Spacey to put on Miller's Resurrection Blues at London's Old Vic, said yesterday. Griffin has lived in the Chelsea for 14 years and produced for Miller after he wast introduced to him by Stanley. "Do we really need another luxury hotel in New York, when we have something that is so unbelievably rare like this? I hope they share our appreciation of the values we all share here."

Stanley, who is working on a book about the hotel's history, and shows off drifts of signed photographs of its most famous former residents, shares that concern. "This is what I have nurtured for 50 years and if they undo it then my legacy is gone," he says. So far, he doesn't like what he has heard about Drucker, head of BD Hotels in New York that has properties including the high-hip Chambers and Maritime Hotels, and his associate Balazs.

"Everything I have read about this organisation tells me that they run different kinds of hotels. I don't want that, I am desperately trying to avoid that. This is not a boutique hotel but a house of kindred spirits and somehow that has to be preserved."

Fortunately for Stanley and his many defenders, he cannot be entirely cast out, because he and the children have accumulated 58 per cent of the owning company's shares. The newcomers say he will stay on in some consulting capacity and as a "goodwill ambassador". But just how much Stanley will be involved remains to be seen. When Drucker is asked why Stanley has been barred from the front desk, he feigns amused bafflement. "Oh, that is just nonsense." But there is a moment of high awkwardness in the lobby when the figure of David Elder emerges from behind Balazs and Drucker.

Elder is one of the heirs that engineered Stanley's ouster. "Hey Stan, we're OK now aren't we," he calls out, aware of the presence of a reporter. When Stanley has stepped out earshot again, he says: "You know, there were some legal corporate issues you may not be aware of." He adds diplomatically: "We are aware of what Stan has created here and it is something unique. It's just we feel we can enhance it."

The new team knows it has a potential media backlash on its hands as enemies of the Chelsea's artistic legacy, and has already hired the PR firm Rubenstein Communications, famous for spinning tinsel from any kind of turd, to defend them. But ambushed by a reporter, they make the first stab at reassurance. They will not turn out those residents already in rooms, they insist. And they will renovate slowly while respecting the hotel's soul. It will always be the Chelsea; it will just function better.

"We don't come to places like this to wreck them," says Drucker behind the closed door of Room 711. "That's not what we do. But if the toilet flushes better I don't think we will have any complaints." On the way out and back on to the landing of the hotel's stunning brass-railed stairwell that runs all the way to its leaded skylight in the roof, he says: "Yes, it's wonderful, isn't it? But look at the dirt. Dirt is not something that people get attached to, you know, especially if it gets attached to them".

At least they are not Ian Schraeger, the man most responsible for the boutique hotel plague and who has recently transformed the once cosy and family-friendly Gramercy Park Hotel into an intimidating and repulsively expensive temple of celebrity. Balazs, in particular, has experience of taking gracious old hotels and renovating them while trying to preserve their spirit, most notably with the Chateau Marmont, another favourite of artists and singers, on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.

"This is the Chateau all over again, 100 per cent," says Balazs who first worked with Drucker turning an old garment factory in Soho into what is now the stylish Mercer Hotel. "No one has anything to fear. This is an absolutely venerable institution rich in cultural history that lots of passionate people feel strongly about. We will respect that."

But Back in his room, Scott Griffin can not hide his doubts. He has stayed in the Chateau Marmont before and after the takeover by Balazs. "I know what the difference is," he says. "It has become much more expensive. Really, it's no different nowadays from staying at the Four Seasons or any other luxury hotel. Which is perfectly fine, of course, but it's more of a straight hotel, much more generic."

Generic. There is that awful word. That is decidedly not what the Chelsea Hotel is. And if it becomes so, Balazs and Drucker will have let all of New York down. And there will be much spinning in graves with markers that have names including Twain, Burroughs, Hendrix and even Nauseating Nancy.