It started with David Bowie in February 1973.
Too hot for the hips, but the popular Chelsea Hotel wasn’t quite good enough for the Plaza, but RCA Records booked the Gramercy Park Hotel for a kimono-clad rocker with a fiery red mullet. He was in New York to perform at Radio City and promote “Aladdin Sane,” the groundbreaking sequel to “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders.”
During his two-week stay, Bowie transformed the 18-story, 330-room hotel into a royal residence in the rock ‘n’ roll city. The third floor, where he was staying, was filled with his crew, drug-fueled groupies, and his famous demon friends, although he wasn’t a fan of elevators. Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Salvador Dali and others attended his show on February 14th.
The sensation that Bowie caused, the intoxicating mixture of cocaine and glitter he left behind, turned a respectable and gradually dilapidated hotel into the Gramercy, an orgy of drugs, sex and power chords.
In the years that followed, The Clash, Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Madonna, Jerry Garcia, Steven Tyler, Axl Rose, Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson were just a few of the free spirits who enjoyed the hotel’s amenities.
“The Gramercy had larger, cheaper rooms with thicker walls than most lodging in Manhattan. It was one of the only places you could call room service to order picks and guitar strings. But most of all, it was its generous atmosphere that made it what it was,” writes Max Weisberg in his new book, The Gramercy Park Hotel: An Icon (History Press, on sale now).
Weisberg points out that it wasn’t just musical instrument accessories available through room service. His grandfather, Herbert R. Weisberg, owned the hotel for nearly 40 years.
“Besides Gramercy, the hotel had a second nickname: ‘Gram.’ “Guests could order ‘Gram at the Gram,’ and a doorman or bellboy would deliver the cocaine to their room like a pepperoni pizza,” he wrote.
“Eventually, bellhops started selling drugs, clerks sold drugs, and even maids, with the help of their boyfriends, found ways to profit from the drug culture that was prevalent in New York at the time.”
Of course, room service at The Glam wasn’t always necessary. You can get a contact high just by moving through the hallways. Hunter S. Thompson shrieked like a banshee while grinding cocaine on a dildo. Marley and his entourage moved through the hall under a cloud of ganja smoke. Band manager James Slimane recalls being dragged into a bathroom with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein and being introduced to “a big sandwich bag full of blows”.
“Debbie said, ‘There’s so much at the hotel. It’s nothing… They give us all this stuff just to surprise us,'” he says in the book. “It was like thousands of dollars worth of cocaine.”
Still, nothing went right at The Glam. Sex Pistol’s Sid Vicious’s savage actions earned him the honor of being one of the only rockers to be banned entirely for throwing a TV out of a 12th-floor room window.
He was banished to the Chelsea Hotel, where he later apparently murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, but was too shocked to remember it.
“There was a lot of drugs. There was a lot of illicit sex. There was a lot of coke. But it was handled more carefully,” said photographer Lee Black Childers, who oversaw Bowie’s 1973 tour.
“In one place (Chelsea) you threw the television out the window. In another place (Gramercy) you also destroyed the television, but you left it in your room so no one noticed.”
When U2 singer Bono arrived at the hotel in 1980, he found the party scene too much.
“I saw the Clash in the lobby,” Bono said in an interview, “and they were really cool, but I knew we weren’t. I was wearing a fur coat… (and) had a bad haircut.”
The non-stop party had its tragic moments. Weisberg remembers seeing an overdose foaming at the mouth in the lobby as a child. His cousin Michael OD’d in room 512 shortly after his 19th birthday in 2001. A year later, his uncle David, who had provided the drugs that killed his nephew Michael, jumped to his death from the roof of a hotel.
Pinky, a “jockey-sized Irish bellhop” who has worked at the hotel for many years, remembers taking the woman to her room. She asked him to open the window, gave him a $10 tip, and asked for $5 in change. After a few seconds, she jumped to her death.
“Why would she ask for the change back?” Weisberg wondered, noting that she knew there were four or five suicides at the hotel.
But Gramercy wasn’t always a drug den or rocker’s paradise.
When the hotel opened in 1925 on a stately site at 2 Lexington Avenue overlooking the city’s only private park, it served as the grand living room of the equally prestigious Gramercy District. For many years, it has been a meeting place for city life figures.
This is where Humphrey Bogart had his first wedding and where a young John F. Kennedy lived with his family for three months in 1927.
It was the bar where Babe Ruth exploded, dropping $100 tips on $0.30 beers. This is where John Barrymore and James Cagney got their hair cut. In the 1960s, this is where Jimmy Hoffa, with mob support, was contracted to build Puerto Rico’s largest hotel and casino.
Harbet Weisberg was initially an active Mafia collaborator, colluding with the Cosa Nostra takeovers of casinos in Cuba and Las Vegas. In 1958, with the help of Errol Flynn, he also met with Castro. Ultimately, after nearly being defeated in Las Vegas, he decided to stick with Gramercy.
According to Steve McQueen, J. Edgar Hoover sometimes bugged Hollywood’s rooms to collect dirty material about homosexuals and people he thought were socialists.
“I lived on beer and cocaine and acid and pot and cheating,” the actor once said of his hotel stays. “Yes, I attended bisexual orgies, one of which was recorded by the FBI at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan. That ugly old queer J. Edgar Hoover must have been watching my sex tape intently.”
In this book, Weisberg makes the hotel a microcosmic metaphor for the evolution of New York City itself. Black Thursday, labor unrest, Prohibition, the war effort, gin-soaked midcentury modernism, the rock revolution, the commercialization of cool, Jimmy Hoffa, the golden age of supermodels, greedy real estate speculation, gentrification, pandemic bankruptcies, it all happened here.
“I was a little surprised,” Weisberg told the Post, having regularly visited his family at the hotel since he was a child and lived there himself for a year in the early 1980s. “Whenever there was a financial crisis or something, someone was on record saying they were in the hotel and said something. During Prohibition, I found Bertrand Russell in the hotel talking about what was going on in New York at the time. When the city collapsed in the ’70s, Al Shankel, president of the teachers’ union, was negotiating in the conference room. It’s a mystery to me how all the moves and shakes and all these historic moments happened.” ”
In 2004, Herbert Weisberg passed away. Hotel mogul Ian Schrager purchased the hotel with real estate investor Abby Rosen. They commissioned Julian Schnabel to decorate the hotel and renovated it luxuriously at great expense. The transformation also includes the creation of Rose Bar, an iconic model-filled nightspot. There, Lady Gaga, Axl Rose and the Black Keys performed, and Winona Ryder, Jared Leto, Kanye West and Russell Simmons partied.
The number of rooms was reduced to 197, but expenses increased significantly. The hotel was struggling. Mr. Schrager sold his holdings to Rosen in 2010, and Rosen permanently closed them during the 2020 pandemic.
“Right before we left, Abby Rosen decided to liquidate everything in the hotel,” Weisberg said. “The sale was a big hit, with velvet furniture and anything with the hotel’s wavy line logo selling like hotcakes. The only thing left in the hotel were the curtains.”
Still, Gram’s story is not yet fully written.
In 2023, hotel owner and operator MCR (the same company that operates the High Line Hotel and the TWA Hotel at JFK) acquired the hotel for $50 million. We plan to reopen this famous spot by the end of this year. MCR did not respond to a request for comment, but Weisberg expects the hotel’s next chapter to be as eventful as its past.
“It’s one of those places where a lot of things can happen. You might die. You might make money dealing drugs. You might find inspiration. You might find love, people go there to get married. It was the intersection of many things. Today, to find that intersection and meet so many different people from different parts of the world, you probably go online.”
Or, he said, “You can go back to the hotel bar.”
