This week's issue of NY Mag asks what led to the suicides of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake? The couple had been together almost 12 years in what the author, David Amsden describes as "... a radiant, obsessive love, a bond formed in no small part by their almost religious belief in the concept of bohemia."
It's true that Duncan valued
bohemia. In August 2006, she wrote on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase, about the destruction of the Gramercy Park hotel and predicted, "I bet somebody does this sort of hatchet job on the Chelsea Hotel next..." And now her fears, paranoid as they may have seemed at the time, appear on the verge of becoming reality.
The Chelsea Hotel was an important place for Duncan and Blake, as it is for so many artists and others. On June 16 of this year, Theresa left a comment on Living with Legends, when she learned that Stanley Bard had been ousted: Terrible news, I have had a bit of anticipatory anxiety about this for years.....
They are turning the Puck Building, where my office was for five years into condos.
Happy Birthday Stanley, you are one of the low gods of New York City.
God bless you Chelsea Hotel, you brought me good luck and big love.
Blake and Duncan loved the Chelsea, and fit right in here, madness and all. Here’s a quote from a happier time in their lives, from an interview in Living with Legends:
I remember before we went to bed we were making out in the window, looking out at the street filling up with snow, it was almost completely quiet and we were overlooking the electric Chelsea Hotel sign, and how it was lit up and haloed by all this snow, and I remember later the wild noises that the hotel made late that night, like some madman in the basement playing a church organ made with the hotel's old radiator pipes.
Unfortunately, in an otherwise perceptive article about Blake & Duncan’s tragic deaths, author David Amsden quotes the above passage in full without mentioning its source, Living with Legends.He does mention other blogs from which he gleaned material though, fairness dictates that he mention ours as well. I feel safe in saying that, if this interview had been published in the New York Times, Amsden would have cited the source.But I’m sure this is just an unintentional oversight on his part and that maybe he will act to correct it – at least in the online version.
(Photo: editrrix)
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