Chelsea Hotel: Hot Bed of Radicalism

Over the past couple of weeks, Chelsea Now has been running a series about the Chelsea Hotel.  Mary Reinholz  (Mary's piece doesn't seem to be online) and I wrote companion pieces and Linda Troeller contributed a photo spread.  More recently, David Gibbons interviewed Stanley Bard. Reinholz lived here in the 70s, smack dab in the  middle of the wild and wooly “inspired madness,” of which we, regretfully, only caught the tail end.  One thing that Reinholz touches on is the radical history of the hotel.  Back in the 60s and 70s this place was a hotbed of dissent, with activists such as Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda, and Valerie Solanas roaming the halls with the standard crop of artists and nuts.  Even Viva and Shirley Clarke were busy getting themselves arrested.   Maurice Girodias  a true champion of the First Amendment, lived here too.  And it was even a meeting place for the Yippies as they planned to protest the Democratic Convention in Chicago. We’ll explore this more fully in another post. -- Ed Hamilton