Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan's rooms reopen at the Chelsea Hotel

(ANSA) - NEW YORK, MAY 21 - With the bathroom redone in marble and brass taps, room 424 is still a work in progress: legendary in the history of music for the torrid and fleeting 'one night stand' of 1968 with Janis Joplin and LeonardCohen immortalized it in one of his most famous songs, ChelseaHotel # 2.

Twelve floors behind the neo-Gothic facade on 23rd Street, one of New York's icons will reopen its doors in the fall as a luxury hotel after a lengthy renovation that new owner Sean McPherson has called "an archaeological dig" in a past of cube creativity.

    There are still about fifty tenants inside the fabulous walls.

A documentary about them, "Walls: Inside The Chelsea Hotel", will be screened on June 17th at the Tribeca FilmFestival.

With the present on the verge of extinction, he returns to the spotlight the past he has seen in and out over the years through the door at 222 of 23rd Sarah Bernhardt and Mark Twain, Arthur Miller and Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac while working on "Onthe Road" (and had a story with Gore Vidal), Arthur C. Clark at the time of 2001 A Space Odyssey when he called the Chelsea Hotel "my spiritual home".

    There is a dark side: Dylan Thomas at 39 got drunk in room 205 until he died of poisoning, while in 100 SidVicious stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978.

For some tenants, it was something of a "brokenhearted hotel": Miller lived in 614 for six years after breaking up with Marilyn Monroe, Ethan Hawke did the same when he separated from Uma Thurman.

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