A photo of the exterior of the Chelsea Hotel at night, with its neon sign reading "hotel" vertically lit up white, with "Chelsea" lit up red horizontally below.
A view of the neon sign adorning the front facade of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, January 10, 2011. (EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP via Getty Images)

A piece of the buzzing neon sign that illuminated New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel could soon light up your living room.

Guernsey’s auction house is conducting “NYC – Downtown, The Auction,” which will offer numerous original items from the recently refurbished artistic hotbed, alongside other ephemera from downtown New York’s heyday, with the consignors including Madonna’s former lover, the estate of famed performer and gallerist Patti Astor, and more, on September 25.

An old sign from longtime Chelsea eatery El Quijote, also available in the sale. Courtesy of Guernsey’s.

“NYC – Downtown, The Auction” stems from the same house’s gavel-smashing charity sale of doors salvaged from the Chelsea Hotel in 2018. Guernsey’s president Arlan Ettinger maintained a relationship with the hotel, which recently approached him about selling its sign, as well as 20 stained glass window fixtures that faced 23rd Street, and even the door to Janis Joplin’s old room (expected to fetch $15,000–$25,000).

The Chelsea Hotel window fixtures. Courtesy of Guernsey’s.

The Chelsea Hotel sign itself will be sold in pieces, as Ettinger told me over the phone, because the monumental trophy is too large to fit in any apartment.

Each letter from the sign’s vertical “Hotel” portion, which in total measures nearly 30 feet tall, will be available as an individual lot, expected to sell for $5,000 to $10,000 each. The horizontal “Chelsea” bit below it, nearly eight feet wide and four feet tall, will remain intact, and could go for $50,000 to $100,000. There are two sets available of both words, since the sign had two sides. TriBeCa neon gallery and retailer Let There Be Neon has rewired the letters so they can function on an average home’s power supply.

Madonna’s guitars. Courtesy of Guernsey’s.

Around the same time that the Chelsea Hotel approached Ettinger, he also heard from the brothers Dan and Ed Gilroy, who lived with Madonna in a synagogue in her pre-fame days. They taught the future mega star how to play music, and eventually formed her first band, Breakfast Club. Dan Gilroy, who dated the singer, went on to become life partner to the late actress Shelley Duvall.

Their contributions this month include Madonna’s first recordings, her notes and letters, and two guitars—an acoustic one she played her first songs on, which is tagged at up to $75,000, and an electric Rickenbacker that she used while busking with the Gilroys, which may fetch as much as $150,000.

A Fun Gallery poster by Keith Haring (1983). Courtesy of Guernsey’s.

Ettinger was also approached by the estate of Patti Astor, whose seminal Fun Gallery helped transform graffiti into a lauded art form, introducing figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Astor became a graffiti expert, and contributed an essay to the catalogue for Guernsey’s groundbreaking graffiti auction in 2000. A poster for a Haring show at the gallery will be on offer.

Basquiat’s undated drawings of Andy Warhol. Courtesy of Guernsey’s.

Anonymous consignors are also lending excitement to “Downtown.” Portraits that Jean-Michel Basquiat drew of Haring and of Andy Warhol after each artist’s death will hit the block, where they’re estimated to achieve $1.5 million to $2 million each. Also, it turns out that Bob Dylan gifted the original first recording of his eponymous 1962 breakout album to a blind man, who is putting the set of three tapes up for sale to benefit a charity that assists the blind. They’re estimated to bring as much as $500,000.

The “Bob Dylan” tapes. Courtesy of Guernsey’s.

These relics will go on public view at the updated Chelsea Hotel on September 22 and 23.