Movie captures glory days of Chelsea Hotel, with nude tenants in hallway

nypost.com:

Robert Having his Nipple Pierced.” These days, according to documentary filmmaker Amelie van Elmbt, such boho shenanigans are in short supply. “The sad thing is that all this legacy is somehow fading,” said van Elmbt, co-director of “Dreaming Walls,” a documentary about New York City’s Chelsea Hotel, premiering Friday as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.And some of the hotel’s permanent residents — who total around 50 — are unhappy about an 11-year makeover that turned the onetime headquarters of bohemian living into a sleek tourist attraction“The worst is that the real residents can’t even afford to have a drink in the hotel’s new bar,” van Elmbt told The Post.She is referring to El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant that has been on the ground floor of the 138-year-old Chelsea since 1930, and recently reopened as an upgraded tribute to the original.

It is no longer beloved by Steve Willis, a resident who fell into the Chelsea after producing a Mariah Carey video there in 1994, snagging Janis Joplin’s former room. “It feels like a recreation of a cool old restaurant,” he told The Post. “There is something painful about acknowledging that it was special but not special enough to preserve.”“Dreaming Walls” chronicles the history of the hotel, name-checking the writers and artists — including Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Jackson Pollack, Mark Twain and Allen Ginsberg — who lived and created there and capturing the Manhattan landmark at a crossroads.

The place spent years going through renovations under various owners and litigation from tenants who did not want the work to be done.

But now the majority of upgrades are in, art is back in the lobby, and guests are paying by the night again. (The hotel will fully.