NYC’s reopened Hotel Chelsea, seen in ‘A Complete Unknown,’ lives up to rock ’n’ roll lore

As we checked into what may be New York’s most storied hotel — at least to rock ’n’ roll fans — I asked for a pamphlet that would point us to where all the history actually took place.

It’s not the Hotel Chelsea’s style to spill its secrets, though. Never mind that its old lore is a big reason its new operators are able to charge $600-plus per night after reopening to the public in late 2022, following a strangely long 11-year rebirth.

“Just walk around the hallways yourselves,” the front-desk rep offered in consolation. “You’ll feel the history.”

The clerk probably felt my eyeroll. Soon, though, I would learn there is indeed a “feeling” at the Chelsea that goes beyond whatever you can read about the hotel, built in 1884 on W. 23rd Street between Midtown and Lower Manhattan.

Reading about it is what brought us there.

My daughter Louisa, 13, devoured Patti Smith’s “Just Kids.” The rock Hall of Famer’s National Book Award-winning 2010 memoir is centered around the Hotel Chelsea and the galvanizing albeit ragamuffin life she led living there with then-boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe as fledgling young artists.

There was plenty of rock history before Smith’s tenure, too. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were frequent guests in the late 1960s. Leonard Cohen lived there and immortalized the place with the NSFW song “Chelsea Hotel #2” (“That was New York / We were running for the money and the flesh”).

Bob Dylan allegedly wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” there, among other songs. There’s a nod to it in the new Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” when we see Timothée Chalamet stand outside the Chelsea’s iconic neon marquee.

Sadly, the Chelsea is also where Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious allegedly stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death during a heroin binge in 1978, also portrayed onscreen in the Hulu series “Pistol.”

That grim, grimy tragedy was rather ironically at the back of my mind as we opened the door to our posh and stylish midsize sixth-floor room. I doubt Sid and Nancy had Bellino linens, a Nespresso machine or a rainfall showerhead.

We booked the room type simply called the Chelsea for $610/night, between the slightly cheaper Petit Chelsea and the spacious suites for $1,000 and up. By New York standards, the 300 square feet felt spacious and luxe, including a large bathroom with antique brass fixtures and a marble sitting table.

In keeping with the hotel’s rock ’n’ roll personality, the room also came with a faux Marshall amp Bluetooth speaker and a minibar that wasn’t so mini.

We took a cozy little breather inside and perused the book on the table by photographer Claudio Edinger, “Chelsea Hotel: Portraits From New York’s Bohemian Mecca.”

“They all look so cool,” my daughter said of the hotel’s residents of the 1960s-70s. Confidently eccentric is what they looked to me, as if they knew they were living where cool things would happen.

“Do you think any of them still live here?” I pondered.

Some of the Chelsea’s old-timers are still there, and many aren’t happy about the makeover. Various fights over zoning and tenant laws tied up the project for a decade, pushing renovation costs to over $30 million.

Weirdly but unavoidably, the 60 or so remaining permanent residents’ homes are randomly interspersed with what are now hotel rooms, only differentiated by letters on the doors instead of numbers.

Tourists are now part of the mish-mashed Chelsea party guest list that has also included many notable authors, poets, artists, actors and scientists — including Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Jackson Pollack, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol and even pre-fame Madonna.

With simple Google searches, you can do what the hotel staff won’t offer and pick out the rooms where all of these famous (and infamous) people and incidents intermingled.

So we did our own walking tour. We started on the 10th floor, where Smith and Mapplethorpe lived in one of the building’s smallest rooms — the crowdedness of the spaces up there seemingly a reflection of New York itself.

“The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder,” Smith wrote in “Just Kids.”

We hustled our way up further to the remodeled 12th floor, featuring a spa and workout space, plus an open-air patio with a skyline view. But before we knew it we’d made our way to all 12 floors.

Throughout the hotel, the walls are lined with original artwork. Much of it was painted or created by past residents, including Warhol, Philip Taaffe and Herbert Gentry.

The Chelsea’s ornate center stairwell might be its most artful feature. Light and dark seem to mingle together there like the disparate guests of past eras, with bright sunlight from a large skylight window casting down on the black ironwork of the stair railings and elevator shafts.

At the ground floor lies the hotel’s other best attribute: a mosaic-tiled, rustic but refined Spanish restaurant and bar called El Quijote. It’s been there since the 1930s, so as you sit in the dimly lit red vinyl booths sipping the sangria or Spanish gin and tonic, you can imagine the lengthy and elaborate conversations that may have gone on there over the years over the same drinks.

Or, more with the times, you can take a bunch of great selfies for your Instagram while sipping a Shirley Temple, as my companion did while we waited for our calamari and steak to arrive.

The hotel’s pricier French-themed restaurant, Cafe Chelsea, seemed nice but less vibe-y, so on our other night we instead splurged on my daughter’s favorite restaurant from prior NYC trips, Il Buco, a famed Italian eatery in Greenwich Village.

We also hit her favorite bookstore, the Strand in the East Village, coincidentally where Patti Smith once worked. We skipped my favorite NYC jazz club, the Village Vanguard, because of its 15-plus age policy but were thankfully able to take in the weekly Latin jazz night at Birdland, farther up the island in Hell’s Kitchen.

Greenwich Village and what’s left of the other, more Bohemian, rock-centric parts of Manhattan were all a short subway or rideshare trek away from the Chelsea. It really is in a great location, likely one practical reason the hotel attracted so many go-getters.

The other, more artful and spiritual reasons for the Hotel Chelsea’s popularity may have diminished with its modern makeover and nicer linens, but they haven’t been lost. And you don’t need a map to find them.

Where: 204 W. 23rd St., New York City.

Online: hotelchelsea.com.