The Revamped Hotel Chelsea’s Reverse Makeover On Screen In “A Complete Unknown”

Hotels don’t win Oscars, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make cameo appearances in movies tapped for Academy Awards. Almost every year, a movie with a scene or two set in a New York City hotel racks up a fistful of nominations or even strikes gold. See Scent of a Woman (filmed at the Waldorf Astoria and the Plaza), Godfather III (filmed at the Waldorf) and Wolf of Wall Street (filmed at the Four Seasons New York).

This year, A Complete Unknown, the history-steeped film that tracks Bob Dylan’s early career, gifted the legendary Hotel Chelsea with a whiff of Oscar magic.  Just a whiff, it turns out. Despite eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, the movie went home empty handed on March 2.

The iconic, spruced up Hotel Chelsea exterior. Hotel Chelsea photo

The Chelsea, of course, doesn’t need an Oscar to burnish its status as a cultural icon. From its fleeting status as the tallest building in New York (a whopping 12 stories) in 1884, to its decades as a cultural incubator, the proudly iconoclastic, Chelsea has been a hotel superstar. The storied guest list is so packed with notables that the A-list guests posted on their website are identified by surname alone — Joplin, Hendrix, Mitchell, Rivers, Twain, Kerouac, Burroughs, Waits and, yes, Dylan, to name a few. As Patti Smith summed up the place in Just Kids, “So many had written, conversed and convulsed in these Victorian dollhouse rooms. So many skirts had swished these worn marble stairs. So many transient souls had espoused, made a mark and succumbed here.”

The movie whisks you to the early 1960s, where you’re immersed in a heady Greenwich Village of jazz clubs, wine bars, coffee houses and night spots so authentic you can almost inhale the cannabis. Yet nearly the entire film was shot in New Jersey, where cities like Paterson and Jersey City still look a lot more like Dylan’s New York than the Bleecker Street of today.

 Before: the main staircase with art supplied by Chelsea tenants in the pre-renovated Chelsea.

The Chelsea’s unmistakable Queen Anne Revival facade is one of the few genuine New York landmarks on view in the movie, and it’s a show stopper. On a rainy night, Dylan (Timothy Chalamet sporting  black shades) is seen heading to the Chelsea (note the signature candy-striped awning and iconic neon sign). The effect is head spinning. Observing that a couple of letters on the neon sign were intentionally left unlit, Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez, told Conde Nast Traveler that she felt like she was “in a time machine” when she first stepped onto the hotel balcony and “looked down at our crew and all those period-specific cars parked in a line.”

“Now the Chelsea’s refurbished and gorgeous, a very different world from what it was,” she added.

The hotel, including the landmarked exterior, is indeed spiffier — and pricier —than in Dylan’s day, when scruffiness was an essential component of its creative vibe. The turnaround began in July 2011, when the Chelsea closed for refurbishment. It reopened in late 2022, transformed into a luxury property following 11 tumultuous years of renovation and litigation.

After: The Premier Chelsea room opens onto the the hotel’s signature balcony. Hotel Chelsea photo

The dramatic overhaul meant that the vintage rooms and hallways seen in the movie had to be specially built and shot on a soundstage. Among the period details inserted by production designer Francois Audouy is Baez’s pink satin bedspread, an indication that she, like many of the creatives-in-residence, had a long-term lease.

Dylan famously lived at the Chelsea off and on during the early to mid ‘60s. In 2018, 52 hotel doors discarded during the hotel’s revamp were sold at auction, including those to rooms once occupied by Jackson Pollock, Bob Marley, Isabella Rossellini, Madonna and the ultimate Door, Jim Morrison. The priciest? Dylan’s door to Room 201, a battered, whitewashed model that sold for an eye-popping $125,000.

The door to Bob Dylan’s room at the Chelsea

That humble relic has little in common with today’s handsome, carved wood guest room doors painted black and bejeweled with brass doorknobs embossed with the Chelsea monogram. The rooms they open onto are, to quote Barbaro, gorgeous. A spacious Premier Room boasts hardwood floors warmed with colorful rugs, a marble bathroom with a soaking tub and rainfall shower, cheeky purple velvet sofas in the seating area and French doors opening onto a balcony boasting the hotel’s famed wrought iron grillwork ($920 a night). Even the tiny, queen-bed rooms are lookers with antiqued brass bathroom fixtures and snowy Bellino linens ($670 a night).

After: Brass closet doorknobs embossed with the Chelsea monogram. Hotel Chelsea photo

The rest of the hotel is equally plush, smartly restored to evoke a historic Greenwich Village with a boho-chic streak, emphasis on chic. The lobby, adorned with a changing display of artwork acquired by the hotel in lieu of rent from tenants that included Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe, is a wonderful place to sit and watch the passing guests as are the stylish new Café Chelsea French bistro, the glamorous Lobby Bar and El Quijote, the hotel’s long-time Spanish restaurant revisited as if in a fever dream. It is, in short, an artful reimagining of a vintage artist haven for guests who probably aren’t artists and don’t want to rough it. And yes, the refreshed Chelsea’s allure is tangible. But if you’re craving a breath of that old Chelsea’s magic, watching A Complete Unknown is your best bet.