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It started with David Bowie in February 1973.
Too hot for the hip but divvy Chelsea Hotel, not yet hot enough for the Plaza, RCA records booked the Gramercy Park Hotel for the kimono-clad rocker with the fire-red mullet. He was in New York to play Radio City and promote “Aladdin Sane,” his breakthrough followup to “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”
During that two week stay, Bowie turned the 18-story, 330-room hotel into the city’s royal residence of rock ’n’ roll. The third floor where he stayed — he wasn’t a fan of elevators — was packed with his crew, drug-fueled groupies and his famous fiends…er friends. Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and Salvador Dalí were among those who attended his Feb 14. show.
The sensation Bowie caused — the intoxicating mix of cocaine and glitter he left in his wake — transformed the respectable, gently decrepit hotel into the “Glamercy” — 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, would be just a few of the libertines who enjoyed the hotel’s amenities.
“The Gramercy had large, cheap rooms with thicker walls than most Manhattan accommodations. It was one of the only places you could call up room service to order a pick or a guitar string. But its tolerant atmosphere, more than anything, is what made the place what it was,” writes Max Weissberg in his new book, “The Gramercy Park Hotel: an Icon” (The History Press, out now).
It wasn’t just instrument accoutrements you could get via room service, notes Weissberg, whose grandfather, Herbert R. Weissberg, owned the hotel for nearly 40 years.
“Other than the Glamercy, the hotel had a second nickname: the ‘Gram.’ Guests could order a ‘Telegram at the Gram,’ meaning a doorman or a bellhop would deliver cocaine to their room like a pepperoni pizza,” he writes.
“Eventually, bellhops were selling drugs, desk clerks were selling drugs, and even maids, aided by their boyfriends, found a way to profit from the drug culture that was so prevalent in New York at the time.”
Of course, room service at The Gram wasn’t strictly necessary. Just moving through the halls could give you a contact high. Hunter S. Thompson mashed his cocaine with a dildo, screeching like a banshee. Marley and his entourage moved through the halls in a cloud of ganja smoke. Band manager James Sliman recalls being dragged into the bathroom with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein and being introduced to “a big sandwich bag full of blow.”
“Debbie said, ‘We have tons of it back at the hotel. This is nothing…They give this stuff to us just to keep us stoned,'” he says in the book. “It was like a couple thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine.”
Still, it wasn’t quite anything goes at The Gram. Sex Pistol Sid Vicious’ feral antics earned him the distinction of being one of the only rockers to be outright banned — for throwing a TV from his room’s 12th floor window.
He was banished back to the Chelsea Hotel — where he later apparently murdered his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, although he was too whacked out to remember it.
“There was a lot of drugs. A lot of illicit sex. Copious coke. But it really was handled in a more discreet fashion,” said photographer Lee Black Childers, who managed Bowie’s ’73 tour.
“In one place [the Chelsea], you threw the TV out the window. In the other place, [the Gramercy], you still destroyed your TV, but you left it in your room so no one knew.”
When U2 singer Bono arrived at the hotel in 1980, he found the party scene all too much.
“We saw the Clash in the lobby,” Bono said in an interview, “they were just so cool, and we knew we weren’t. I had a fur coat … [and a] crap haircut.”
The nonstop party had tragic moments. Weissberg remembers seeing a foaming-at-the-mouth overdose in the lobby in his childhood. His cousin, Michael, OD’d in room 512 just after his 19th birthday in 2001. A year later, his uncle David, who had supplied the drugs that killed his nephew Michael, jumped to his death from the hotel’s roof.
The hotel’s longtime “jockey-sized Irish bellhop” Pinky recalls taking a woman up to her room. She asked him to open the window, tipped him $10 and asked for $5 change. Seconds later she jumped to her death.
“Why did she ask for the change back,” Weissberg wonders, noting that he knows of four or five suicides at the hotel.
But the Gramercy wasn’t always a drug den or rockers paradise.
When the hotel opened in 1925 on the stately spot at 2 Lexington Ave., overlooking the city’s only private park, it served as a respectable living room for the equally respectable Gramercy neighborhood. Over the years, it hosted the who’s who of city life.
It was 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 blew off steam and dropped $100 tips on $0.30 beers. It was where John Barrymore and James Cagney got their hair cut. It was where, in the 1960s, Jimmy Hoffa made a deal to build the largest hotel and casino in Puerto Rico, with mob backing.
Herbet Weissberg was a willing mafia collaborator at first, co-conspiring on Cosa Nostra takeovers of Cuban and Vegas casinos. He even met with Castro with the help of Errol Flynn in 1958. Eventually, after nearly getting whacked in Vegas, he decided to stick to running the Gramercy.
J. Edgar Hoover even tapped the rooms to gather smut on suspected Hollywood queers and socialists, according to Steve McQueen.
“I lived on the brew and cocaine, along with acid, pot, and f—k-flings,” the actor once said of his residency at the hotel. “Yes, I attended bisexual orgies, one of them taped by the FBI at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan. I bet that ugly old queer J. Edgar Hoover got an eyeful watching the sex tapes of me in action.”
In the book, Weissberg spins the hotel into a microcosmic metaphor for the evolution of New York City itself. Black Thursday, labor disputes, prohibition, the war effort, gin-soaked mid-century modernism, the rock revolution, the commodification of cool, Jimmy Hoffa, the golden age of supermodels, rapacious real estate speculation, gentrification, pandemic bankruptcy: It all happened here.
“I was kind of surprised,” Weissberg, who would regularly visit family at the hotel growing up and lived there himself for a year in the early ’80s, told The Post. “Anytime there was a financial crisis or something, there’d be somebody in the hotel, on the record saying something. During prohibition I found [English philosopher] Bertrand Russell at the hotel talking about what was going on in New York at the time. When the city collapsed in the 70s, Al Shanker, the president of the teachers’ union, was in the conference room negotiating. It’s a mystery to me how every mover and shaker and all these historical moments converged at the Gramercy.”
In 2004, Herbert Weissberg died. Hotel mogul Ian Schrager bought the hotel with real estate investor Aby Rosen. They commissioned Julian Schnabel to help decorate the hotel and spent huge sum to give it a luxury makeover. The transformation included the creationn of the iconic, model-soaked night spot, the Rose Bar — where Lady Gaga, Axl Rose and the Black Keys performed and Winona Ryder, Jared Leto, Kanye West and Russell Simmons partied.
They reduced the room count to 197, while dramatically increasing expenses. The hotel struggled. Schrager sold his stake to Rosen in 2010, and Rosen shuttered it for good during the pandemic in 2020.
“Just before leaving, Aby Rosen decided to liquidate everything in the hotel,” Weissberg said. “The sale was a bonanza, sparking a frenzy for velvet furniture and anything with the hotel’s squiggly logo … All that remained in the hotel was the curtains.”
Still, the Gram’s story isn’t fully written yet.
In 2023, hotel owner-operator MCR — the company behind the High Line Hotel and the TWA Hotel at JFK — bought it for $50 million. By the end of this year, they plan to reopen the storied spot. MCR didn’t respond to request for comment, but Weissberg is hopeful that the hotel’s next chapter will be just as eventful as its past.
“It’s one of those places where so much could happen. You could die. You could make a drug deal and make money. You could find inspiration. You could find love, people go there to get married. It was the intersection of so much. Today, to find that intersection, to come across 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.”
English (US)