CHELSEA FAÇADE GETS EVEN MORE CROWDED

            This is the week we’ve all been waiting for.  A new plaque will be added to the front of the Chelsea Hotel.  The place will be crawling with media since another star is being added to the Walk of Fame. The recipient is filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

            Clarke, who died in 1997 at the age of 77, lived at the Chelsea in the sixties and seventies.  She is famous for her cinema verité depictions of street life, such as 1963’s Cool World, about street gangs in Harlem, and 1967’s Portrait of Jason, an interview with a black homosexual (I guess it sounded more shocking in those days).  Clarke will be the first woman to be honored with a plaque on the Chelsea.

            The big question now is, where are they going to mount the new plaque?  In case you haven’t looked at the facade of the hotel, there are already plaques honoring Thomas Wolfe, James Schuyler, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke, and Virgil Thomson.  Besides these, there’s a general Chelsea Hotel plaque.  That’s a damn lot of hardware a hangin’, and there’s not much room left.  They may have to move or remove one of the plaques to give Shirley a spot.

            So, who to remove and who to add?  We did a Google trend analysis to find out who was the most popular among the possible nominees and those who already have plaques.  Arthur Miller should have a plaque, he blows everybody else away, followed by Dylan Thomas and then, way back, Arthur C. Clarke.  Thomas Wolfe and Brendan Behan get a few hits each, and apparently no one at all has heard of Edgar Lee Masters, author of The Spoon River Anthology. Sorry, Edgar Lee.
 

            

The next question is: who else deserves a plaque?  So many famous people have lived here that it’s difficult to decide.  I say William Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch here, but Debbie thinks there’s already enough writers.  Shirley Clarke is also the first visual artist to be so honored.  Among Visual artists, Larry Rivers is a good candidate.  There really should be more women and visual artists, so perhaps Stella Waitzkin, who, though not enormously famous, created perhaps the greatest of all the idiosyncratic Chelsea rooms with her polyster resin books and sculptures.  (One of our neighbors also thinks Stella is a good candidate.)

            Then, of course, there are the enormously famous, the real celebrities: Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edie Sedgwick.  Not to mention our beloved Gingie the dog, who wandered the corridors of this hotel for a decade or more until the cold hand of death snatched her from our midst.  (Please note that I am NOT attempting to compare Shirley Clarke to a dog.)

            Or perhaps we should just forget about all of these poseurs, tear down all the plaques that already clutter the facade, and just erect one enormous plaque to Sid and Nancy, the brightest of all the stars in the Chelsea pantheon.  Hell, maybe even a neon sign is in order.

           Who do you think deserves a plaque on the front of the Chelsea?

[There will also be a dinner and a showing of Clarke's movie, Ornette: Made in America on the evening of Sept. 20^th  at the National Arts Club.  Stanley Bard will give a talk before the film.]