An open door into the rooms of Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and other residents of the legendary Chelsea Hotel

Albert Scopin arrived in New York the day after man landed on the moon, in the summer of 1969. He came from southern Germany. Trained as a photographer in Munich, he still used his birth name, Schöpflin. He was 25 years old and had $270 in his pocket. Enough to settle into 222 West 23rd Street, in a sort of darkroom with a tap: one of the lowest-tier rooms in the legendary Chelsea Hotel.

“Even the Chelsea had a kind of social hierarchy. The residents of the upper floors were highly respected, and generally, they were better positioned,” he notes in Scopin: Chelsea Hotel, a new book that brings together his memories and the photographs he took there until 1971, recovered after having been lost for almost four decades.

Scopin kept a list of the 10 photographers he wanted to work with. Headed by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, number 10 was Bill King. He would eventually work with him. A regular contributor to Harper’s Bazaar, King had a reputation for being difficult. In the evenings, after finishing his commissioned work, he would organize nude photo shoots with famous people.

“People were so different, and everyone found the nude sessions exciting,” Scopin recalls. “Photographing in that way was something new, in keeping with the times. A visual and sensual experience. And yet, those photographs were never published in a book. King forgot to arrange the printing rights. But that, too, was in keeping with the times. It wasn’t about making a book; it was about doing what you wanted.”

During one of those sessions, he met Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, who were also staying at the Chelsea Hotel at the time. “Robert was attractive, cold, cynical, distant; Patti, with her punk aesthetic, expressive face, direct way of speaking, was full of life,” the photographer recalls. “Suddenly, Patti unleashed tremendous energy during the session. She gave the impression that she could run up the walls and ceiling; it was fascinating. Robert, on the other hand, remained completely impassive, the exact opposite, fascinating in a different way.”

A short time later, he photographed the couple in their hotel rooms, as he would with other guests. Each apartment was itself a portrait of its occupant. Patti’s was “the epitome of creative chaos.” It was real chaos, “unadorned, yet everything was in its place,” Scopin recalls. “Her husky voice gave me goosebumps, especially when she recited her own poems, which she did often, ‘like a mad diamond,’ to quote Pink Floyd.” Mapplethorpe’s apartment, on the ground floor, was by contrast much more orderly. He posed for the photographer next to the erotic collages he was working on before he began experimenting with Polaroids.

These were the most formative days of the photographer’s life, as he discovered new ideas and ways of living. His value system crumbled and had to be rebuilt within that haven for artists, writers, and musicians, where every room held a story. Built in 1884 as one of the city’s first residential cooperatives, it became a hotel in 1905. Stanley Bard was its manager for over 40 years.

“The Robin Hood of hotel managers and owners worldwide,” Scopin notes. “If an artist couldn’t pay their bill, Stanley didn’t throw them out. Instead, he allowed them to settle it with a painting or put up with their flimsy excuses for months. Sometimes he even lent money to his guests.” He allowed filmmaker Miloš Forman to stay for three years without paying a penny.

Dylan Thomas died at the Chelsea after writing Under Milk Wood; it’s a widespread myth that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road at Chelsea Hotel; Arthur C. Clarke occupied room 1008 when he set out to write 2,000 words a day until he completed 2001: A Space Odyssey; Bob Dylan wrote Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands while living there with his first wife, Sara Lownds; Leonard Cohen’s song dedicated to the legendary establishment tells of his affair with the white lady of the blues, Janis Joplin, whom he first met in the elevator. However, success and failure lived side by side in the building’s 12 floors. “We all stretched towards the sun, like flowers in a meadow,” Scopin recalls.

On the rooftop, Chancy Déveureaux, one of the hotel’s most melancholic residents, posed for the photographer wearing designer Charles James’s iconic Clover Leaf dress. Considered the first American couturier, he died penniless in one of the hotel’s rooms. The photographer also captured the artist, vagrant, and activist Vali Myers, who inspired Tennessee Williams to create the character of Carol Cutrere in Orpheus Descending. Jackie Curtis, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, was immortalized, revealing the pop icon’s name tattooed on his arm. Holly Woodlawn, the subject of the first verse of Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, also posed for the camera.

He photographed the author of The Female Eunuch, the feminist Germaine Greer — who in those days dazzled with her intellectual sharpness opposite Norman Mailer, representing the old male literary guard in a famous debate at New York’s Town Hall — in a pose that seemed intentionally to justify the opinion he had of her: “She was one of the most unpleasant people I met there.”

He did not think the same of Lola, the neighbor next door, who always seemed to be waiting for someone, but was always alone. She left her room twice a week: once to go to the psychiatrist and once to do the shopping. Among that diverse group of people photographed was also Wim Wenders, who was passing through New York. Jonas Mekas occupied one of the smaller rooms, whose kitchen was full of round film canisters.

For Scopin, photography became a tool for self-discovery. “As I connected with others, I also learned about myself,” he explains. “It was much more than a way to record something or earn money. It taught me to understand my feelings, my passions, and above all, my fears. Later, when I became a professional photographer, that creative quest to uncover a personality became more objective. That’s why I stopped taking photographs after 20 years and began a new life drawing and painting: a bold and challenging adventure, but, with hindsight, the right one.”

In the spring of 1972, the photographer left the Chelsea Hotel. “Never before and never thereafter have I encountered a crowd more diverse, more vein and more fantastical,” he writes on his website. “The bizarre paradox I observed was that in all their efforts to be unique, in all their efforts to become noticed, in all their efforts to become famous — all those people were surprisingly similar — made similar by their efforts to be different.”

“We were careful and careless at the same time,” Scopin points out. “We drew close to one another, we wanted to feel each other, and that unleashed an enormous energy: it shaped us. Today I don’t see anything like that. Now we live in very different circumstances, and our questions and our fears are different.”

As a freelancer, the photographer collaborated with the German magazine ZEITmagazin, to whom he sent the entire set of photographs for safekeeping in their archives. But this did not happen: when he requested them a decade later, they had vanished. Probably stolen. Finally, in 2016, a gallery owner successfully recovered the photographs in the German city of Bremen.

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