Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

Florent has a similar spirit

My favorite restaurant, Florent, maintains a similar spirit to the Hotel Chelsea.  This week, The New York Times restaurant critic reviewed Florent. Here are a few tips that he didn’t learn from his visit.  If you get lucky, you could end up participating in the “Guess which celebrity I waited on last week?” quiz.  But of course, you have to be able to provide a celebrity quiz in return. Your waiter/writer could be the author of the recently released short story collection, You Are Not the One.  Or, he could be the author of an Unauthorized Biography of Donna Summers.  Plus, there is much more to Darinka than her signature beehive hairstyle.  If you stop by, ask her about her latest exhibit.

Sparkle Hayter

A former resident was gracious enough to launch the 5 questions feature.  For the interview the artist will be known as WTP.

1. What do you do?

I work in the arts.

2. How long have you lived in the Chelsea?

I lived there for almost nine years from 1992-2001.

3. What made you decide to move into the Chelsea?

The wind blew me in when I needed a place, I met with Stanley and, bless his heart, he offered me a little studio on 4 for about $800 a month,including utilities, shared bathroom.  I planned to stay a few months but I ended up staying for years.

4. What's your favorite Chelsea Hotel story?

There are so many, but I always had a soft spot for the story of Edgar Lee Masters and Alice.  Edgar Lee had given up his straight-backed bourgeoisie life to run off with Alice to the Chelsea Hotel to write poetry, even though his family cut him off for it.  They were legendary outlaw lovers, in love to the end.  Alice lived there until she died at a very old age.  The older staff will tell you that she sparkled to the end.

Masters wrote a wonderful poem about the Chelsea.  If you can find it, you should post it.  Florence Turner includes it in her book, At the Chelsea. In it he predicts the Chelsea will cease to exist before the century ends, overwhelmed by greed and commerce.  He and Alice would be delighted to know it still survives and still has the same spirit.  Joe Myers, Casebeer, Norm Gosney and I had a party in honor of them one night on the roof garden by the pyramid, a “White Glove Party.”  The phrase comes from a ritual Edgar Lee and Alice had.  They never had much money, but whenever a chunk arrived they’d always splurge a little, “put on the white gloves and go dancing at the Astor,” as Alice put it.

Two other favorite stories involve El Quijote, the Spanish seafood restaurant in the building, and the wonderful Arnold Weinstein.  He was there once, waiting for Arthur Miller at the bar, when he saw Joe DiMaggio across the room.  DiMaggio left  moments before Miller arrived, so they just missed each other.  They were both post-Marilyn at the time.

Another time, Arnold had a drink there with William S. Burroughs before taking him to see a play he, Arnold, had written.  This was after Burroughs shot his wife Joan in Mexico.  In the play, a man handily shoots a grape off his beloved’s head during the first flush of their love.  Later he shoots an apple, then a canteloupe I think.  Finally,
much later in their relationship, the woman puts a watermelon on her head and the man misses the watermelon, and shoots and kills her.
       “What did Burroughs think?” I asked.
       “I don’t know.  He never mentioned it.”

5. If you no longer live in the Chelsea, would you ever consider moving
back?

If it was possible, I would.  It seems unlikely at the moment.  But I visit it regularly in my dreams where I see all my living friends there, and all my dead friends from the Chelsea are still alive and there too.
WTP

Help Map Manhattan

Randy Cohen is proposing to create a literary map of the homes of the characters in
New York based novels.   Since I only know about a particular haunt of a few authors I’m not going to be very helpful.  Read We’ll Map Manhattan and share your knowledge.

Hotel Chelsea: commercialisation of the blog?

Grumpy Old Bookman doubts that this blog is a labor of love created by a part-time amateur.  He is giving the Hotel Chelsea management team way too much credit.  No one has ever accused the hotel's managers of doing anything in a professional manner.  If this was a corporate blog there would be absolutely no mention of cockroaches.

Eating my words. Shortly after I made the above post I found a blogger who had something nice to say about management. "So I called the Chelsea Hotel and spoke to the manager who found him a room; I love the hotel managers of NY, they always have that air of exasperated efficiency and always manage to fit you in somehow."

Slashed Wrists at the Chelsea Hotel

Run right out and see The Interpreter.  I haven’t seen it, but during the filming two years ago Sean Penn was around the hotel quite a bit.  It was after he had won an Oscar for Mystic River.  One day my neighbor and I were exiting the elevator and he was getting on.  My neighbor, the perky, friendly type said “Congratulations on your Oscar.”  He glared at her.  As we were walking out through the lobby she asked, “he did win the Oscar didn’t he?”

Performance Artist versus Beat Poet: Last Round Before the Old Folks Home

Sunday’s quiet was interrupted by two aged bohemians who resorted to fisticuffs to settle a dispute over elevator access.  The P.A. was already on the elevator when the B.P.  attempted to get in, along with his bicycle.  The P.A. blocked his entrance and told him to wait for the next elevator.  (The elevators take forever.)  The B.P. tried to force his way on at which point the P.A. called him a “stupid old woman.”  This riled the B.P. who threw his bike at the P.A. and spat upon him.  This would have devolved into an even uglier bout had not a fashion designer run out and told them they were both acting like little kids and shamed them into ceasing.  One of them took the stairs.  This was only the latest round in a long standing feud.  The feud is not over literary or artistic matters, as far as I know.

Note:  The Slice of Life stories are fictional. All characters and events herein are likewise
fictional. Any resemblance to persons living or dead or events are purely coincidental. No animals were hurt during the creation of these stories.  Copyright Ed Hamilton 2006

To Do List

Monday, April 25 at 7:00 writer Charlie Huston will be reading at the BoxCar Lounge reading series.  In his earlier novel, Caught Stealing, he wrote, “We walk a couple of blocks to Twenty-third Street and check into the Chelsea Hotel.  It may be hip now, but it’s still a flop.  The desk clerk is so jaded that we don’t raise an eyebrow even when I pay with cash.”   I guess characters on the lam don't stop to admire the roaches.

Wednesday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. Vestal McIntyre reads from You Are Not the One at the KGB Bar.  Sam Lipsyte whose novel Home Land contains a sentence or two about the Hotel Chelsea and Sam Shaw will also read.

Thursday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m. spoken word artist Jose Padua (a winner of the Moving Words Poetry Competition) will read at the Arlington Central Library at 1015 N. Quincy Street. What does this have to do with the Chelsea ?  I have an eight year old bottle of Makers Mark with his fingerprints on it sitting in my liquor cabinet.  It is the remains of a case that he gave to my boyfriend and me as a housewarming gift when we moved into the Hotel.  If you can't make the reading, read his poem, Breakfast at McDonalds.

They Always stay at the Chelsea

"And every time the Kills — singer/guitarist VV (a.k.a. Alison Mosshart) and drummer/guitarist/singer Hotel (a.k.a. Jamie Hince) — are in New York, they make it a point to stay at the Chelsea in Room 105, which used to belong to Warhol actress/muse Edie Sedgwick. It wasn't the first room Sedgwick rented at the hotel, but it was the one management finally placed her in after she had shown an affinity for setting previous rooms ablaze.

"Edie set fire to a bunch of rooms and her wrists and things," Hince said in a thick British drawl. "There's a book with all these photographs of her ... she's all burnt and blistered ... and when I first stayed [at the Chelsea], I filmed every corridor because I had to capture everything."  Photos of a burnt and blistered Edie, I’d like know which book he’s talking about?

Firebugs

I came home last Friday night (April 15) to find hundreds of firefighters rushing into the hotel. My neighbors had gathered in the lobby and were bonding with the tourists around this unplanned entertainment.  The tourists wondered if they would get a discount for the inconvenience.  Not on your life we assured them.  You’ll pay double for the pleasure of surviving a fire in the bohemian theme hotel.   

While rushing the water hoses up the stairs to the ninth floor, New York’s bravest were met by a ballet dancer on his way down the stairs.  The firemen told him to get off of the stairs.  He replied, with a flourish of his hand, “Fuck you, take the service elevator.”

Fires are big at the Chelsea.  Yevgency Yevtushenko’s poem “Soot,” describes a fire that the poet experienced at the hotel in 1977.  I awoke to find soot “like black worms, crawling in the cracks on all floors.”   Again in the 70’s Warhol superstar Edie set fire to her place when the oven exploded while she was trying to bake a sweet potato.

Anniversary of Nabokov's b-day

Former Chelsea resident and author of the notorious Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, was born on this day in 1899.

Virgil Thomson is still an inspiration

A Portraitist Whose Canvas Is a Piano reports on a muscial composition that Phillip Glass has written as a portrait of the painter Chuck Close.  The piece belongs to the tradition of musical portraits that Virgil Thomson wrote of his friends in his Chelsea Hotel apartment.

The hotel has roaches.  As noted by a recent writer/guest, Kim Addonizio.  I am so shocked.  Did she think this was a normal hotel?  Didn't she know it is a bohemian theme hotel.  What would the bohemian experience be without roaches.

Greater writers than Addinoizio have noticed the roaches. Upon arriving at the Chelsea, Dylan Thomas “complained that it was dingy. ‘The cockroaches have teeth,” he remarked to Liz Reitell…”  Dylan Thomas by Paul Ferris.

Mr. Blackburn is no longer moving along the halls with the assistance of a walker, but his art lives on.
Creative Space: Robert Blackburn

Fifty Years of Robert Blackburn's PrintMaking Workshop

Cherry Ramone: Broadcasting From Somewhere Within the Bowels of the Chelsea

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