Local Paper Chelsea Now Says Bring Back David Bard

You can add the community newspaper Chelsea Now to the growing chorus of voices outside of the hotel that realize that the Chelsea Hotel can only be managed by the Bard family. (The same has previously been said by hotelier Ira Drukier and actor Ethan Hawke.)  In the wake of Andrew Tilley’s shameful abdication, Chelsea Now proposes a compromise between the minority shareholders and the Chelsea Hotel ’s tenants: bring back David Bard as general manager of the Chelsea under the (hopefully limited) direction of the minority shareholders.  Chelsea Now is right in saying that tenant activists would support this compromise, and so now the only barrier seems to be minority shareholder Marlene Krauss’s perverse desire to bury the Bard family at all costs.  And costly it has been indeed for the Chelsea Hotel and its shareholders, as occupancy rates reportedly sunk to 20% or less under Tilley’s incompetent stewardship.  
         We would like to point out, however, that while Chelsea Now claims that “. . .the more outspoken tenants’ guerilla tactics have been disgraceful. . .” referring perhaps to Tilley’s unproven claim to have received panties and magazine subscriptions in the mail, the newspaper fails to mention the hotel management’s own far more reprehensible tactics, such as hiring goons to assault a tenant (David Elder admitted to this in a DHCR hearing), endangering tenants with illegal construction, and evicting tenants, including the elderly. THIS IS OUR HOME, FOLKS! There is a vast difference in kind here between the tactics of dedicated, unpaid activists (which no one would be complaining about if they hadn’t been successful) and those of management.  While Tilley may have been made uncomfortable by some tenants’ actions, I have yet to hear of anyone showing up at his home in New Jersey and attempting to turn him out into the street.  
     Nobody is trying to evict Marlene Krauss either, though it she keeps investing in ponzi schemes, she may finally come to empathize with the plight of the Chelsea  Hotel’s tenants. -- Ed Hamilton