Introduction

This book came about as the result of a fire. My girlfriend, Debbie Martin, and I were walking up Seventh Avenue one evening, coming home from dinner at the neighborhood restaurant Tello’s. As we rounded the corner of 23rd Street, we were met by a cacophony of sirens. A line of fire trucks stretched down the block. Hoping that it wasn’t the Chelsea, though knowing all the while that it must be, we approached our building warily. Sure enough, there were firemen running in and out of the hotel. At first they tried to keep us away, but when we explained that we lived there, they let us into the lobby.

Twenty or more of our neighbors had gathered there, in various states of disarray. As the Chelsea is an artistic hotel, they were all writers and artists and musicians—and all wildly eccentric. Someone had brought a jug of wine, and we passed this around as the firemen poured in and out of the building, dragging their equipment with them. No one knew yet what had caused the fire, or the extent of its damages, and we all discussed our theories.Various intrigues played themselves out in the hours we passed before it was safe to go back to our rooms.

An older lady, a former theater actress and a resident of the hotel for more than twenty years, had rescued her good winter coat and her mink hat from the blaze. She sat in her chair with her coat buttoned up, though she soon took the hat off her head and placed it in her lap. A young girl who had lived at the hotel for about a year, working as an artist’s model, spotted that hat and just had to try it on. She kept insisting, even when it became clear that the old lady didn’t want to give it up. “No, I’m serious. Let me wear that,” she kept repeating, until finally the old lady, scowling, was forced to part with her hat. The girl wore it around the lobby for the rest of the night, showing it off to everyone, while the old lady kept a sharp eye on her to make sure she didn’t slip away.

At about this point our inimitable proprietor, Stanley Bard, marched the fire chief through the lobby, saying, “This is a very famous hotel. Thomas Wolfe lived here, and the poet Dylan Thomas.” It was his usual spiel, though now sounding strangely at odds with the gravity of the situation, and we all laughed knowingly. That was Stanley for you: all was roses when it came to the hotel. He never could see the dark side, even if the place was burning to the ground.

There were several tourists mixed in among us, as the Chelsea also plays host to transients. One man, apparently from the Midwest to judge by his accent, had shared our wine and talked with us, becoming increasingly puzzled as the night wore on. He had caught on that we were all artists, but had yet to wrap his mind around the notion of people living in a hotel. Finally he asked, “How do all you people know one another? Are you in town for a convention or something?”

But the incident I remember best came toward the end of the night when a young guy named Felipe, who had lived at the hotel for less than a week, came limping into the lobby on crutches. Despite our best efforts, everyone in the lobby cracked up laughing when they saw him. Wearing nothing but a red down coat over a pair of briefs, Felipe had painted his face in ghastly shades of orange and red and black. He looked as if had he just narrowly escaped the fire, having scarcely enough time to throw on his coat over his jockey shorts and drag himself down the stairs. But no, as it turned out, he was merely heading out for a night of clubbing. It didn’t look like he would be dancing much, but he sure as hell was going to give it the old college try.

Maybe Felipe’s appearance was what did it. In any event, it was sometime that night that Debbie came up with the idea for Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog (www.hotelchelseablog.com). We were talking about how interesting and exciting life was at the hotel, and lamenting that, in the face of rising real estate prices and gentrification, all this would soon pass away. Few of the hotel’s residents are rich—most of them are far from it, in fact—and though Stanley Bard had kept the rents affordable over the years, there was mounting pressure on him from his board of directors to start charging market rate for the rooms. As our neighbor, the concert pianist Bruce Levingston, says, “It looks like we’re on the tail end of the comet here.”

We wanted to do something to preserve the history of this unique and vibrant hotel while that history was still ongoing and developing. But since so many disparate events were happening around us at all times—a point driven home by the chaos in the lobby on the night of the fire—a standard academic history of the hotel clearly wouldn’t do. We needed a nonnarrative format, where we had the flexibility to record anything that came up, and where residents and former residents could send us whatever material—be it poetry, photography, or artwork—that they had a notion to submit. And that was how Debbie came up with the idea of the blog, a newly emerging format that was made to order for our purpose.

It seemed like a hell of a lot of work to me, and so I tried to talk Debbie out of it. But she said it wouldn’t be that bad, at least from a technological standpoint. She knew her way around computers, so she could handle that aspect of the project. What she needed was content, and that’s where I came in. Debbie suggested I write a weekly column for the blog.

“No way!” I said. “I don’t have time. I’m working on a novel.”

Luckily, Debbie was able to persuade me. “All right, All right!” I finally gave in. “I’ll write fifty-two stories, a year’s worth, and that’s all. And then I’m going back to work on my novel.”

Of course it didn’t turn out quite that way. Though I was able to produce the fifty-two stories in a matter of a couple of months, in doing so I realized that the ten years I had lived here had given me a lot more to say about the hotel. I found that the lives of my neighbors were what really interested me, and as I became consumed in writing their darkly humorous and often tragic stories, I forgot about the novel and still haven’t gotten back to it.

The Chelsea is, to say the least, a unique hotel. Built in 1883 as a luxury co-op apartment residence, the Chelsea was for a brief period the tallest building in New York. In 1905 the building became a residential hotel, catering to the luminaries of the New York theater world, people like Sarah Bernhardt—who reputedly slept in a coffin—and Lillian Russell. Other early residents included Mark Twain and O. Henry, who, often on the lam from the law, gave a different name every time he checked in. In the thirties, Thomas Wolfe stormed and brooded in Room 829 and wrote You Can’t Go Home Again there.

The forties and fifties were hard times for the hotel, at least in a physical sense. Stained-glass windows, mirrors, and ornate woodwork were torn out, and the large suites were divided into tiny rooms, as the hotel degenerated into little more than a flophouse. Fortunately, many of the old residents refused to move out, and so a lot of the grand architectural detail was preserved. In 1957, Dylan Thomas drank eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern, staggered back to the Chelsea, and said, “That must be the record,” before collapsing and being taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died a few days later. Years later, Brendan Behan would do his best to follow in Dylan’s footsteps.

William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in the Chelsea, and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lived here for a time as well. (Lesser Beats such as Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke could be found wandering the halls in later years; Huncke died here in 1996.) Arthur Miller lived here, pre- and post-Marilyn, as did Arthur C. Clarke, writing 2001, A Space Odyssey, in a vain attempt at escape.

The sixties were the Warhol years, and several of his superstars lived in the hotel—including Nico, Brigid Berlin, and Gerard Malanga—and starred in his film Chelsea Girls, shot primarily in the hotel. (Viva lived here up until the early nineties.) Bob Dylan lived here from 1961 to 1964, and wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Leonard Cohen lived here, received a blow job from Janis Joplin, and wrote “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” to commemorate the experience. Joni Mitchell wrote “Chelsea Morning” about the hotel, inspiring Bill and Hillary—though no one remembers them staying at the hotel—with a name for their daughter.

In the seventies, the Chelsea was home to punk rockers such as Iggy Pop and Dee Dee Ramone. Patti Smith roomed here with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. And in 1978 Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols allegedly stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in Room 100, taking his own life a few months later.

Madonna lived here in the eighties and later photographed her book Sex in Room 822. The artists Julian Schnabel and Philip Taaffe lived here in the eighties and nineties and maintain studios here to this day. Party hostess Susanne Bartsch moved here in 1981 and never left.

The nineties were another era of physical change for the hotel, this time in the opposite direction. The proprietor, Stanley Bard, took heroic measures to return the hotel to a semblance of its old grandeur, refurbishing the common areas and many of the rooms as well. Notable tenants in this decade included the comedian Eddie Izzard, the director Abel Ferrara, and the singer/songwriter Ryan Adams.

The new century saw the increased gentrification of the Chelsea neighborhood—as literally dozens of condo buildings sprung up all around—and of the hotel. For better or worse, rents have gone up and more prosperous tenants have moved in. Luminaries of the present decade include: Ethan Hawke, Marianne Faithfull, Julie Delpy, Rufus Wainwright, and (until his untimely death) the one-of-a-kind Dee Dee Ramone, who lived here off and on for three decades and never gave a damn if the place was fancy or not.

As Stanley Bard, who took over operation of the hotel from his father in 1957, enters his fifth decade at the helm, the Chelsea has suddenly become a hot real estate property. Stanley has always managed to keep the rents at least somewhat affordable for the writers and artists in residence, but now his partners (represented by a board of directors) are clamoring for profits and ready to move the building in a more lucrative direction. Though Stanley swears he’ll never retire, even he can’t hold out forever. (We’re all hoping he hangs in there through at least 2008, the 125th anniversary of the Chelsea.) Certainly, whatever else happens, when Stanley goes, it will mean the end of an era.

I initially didn’t intend to write about the famous people who have lived at the hotel, as I figured enough had been written about them already. Not everyone with a creative dream can be a success, and I wanted this book to be about the no-less-valid struggles of the artists, writers, con men, and lunatics who have lived here over the years, serving as inspiration for those talented and thick-skinned and lucky enough to have hit the big time. Devoting your life to the arts often exacts a heavy toll in bitterness, disappointment, and failure, and I wanted the book to be about this dark side of the creative dream. There’s a famous creative energy that pervades the Chelsea. You feel it when you walk through the door, and you never cease to feel it for as long as you live here. Its demands are a lot to live with, and it can come over time to be perceived as a negative energy. It should come as no real surprise that it overwhelms some of the more sensitive among us.

But as I was putting the book together, one thing that struck me was the frequency with which the luminaries of the past seemed to come up. As it was, this amounted to little but name-dropping, though there was a distinct suggestion that these people played a greater role in the lives of the present residents than I was giving them credit for. My agent, Bob Shuman, noticed this as well, and it was he who suggested that I write a bit about the famous people I mention. I told him more than once that I wasn’t a historian, that I just write about things that happen in my own life, but he seemed to assume that in time I would come around to his way of thinking, and eventually I did.

And I’m glad I did come around, as it opened up a whole new realm of creativity for me, allowing me to come to a fuller understanding of what the title of our blog, Living with Legends, signifies. For we live side by side with the giants of the past, and it’s the influence of these legends that we all have to live up to in our everyday lives. And perhaps that’s the real source of the energy that pervades the hotel. The great deeds of the past (and the not-so-great as well) hang on our walls—almost literally—like banners of achievement, haunting and coloring our time here with their presence. And let’s remember, too, that the famous haven’t all escaped unscathed either. (Nor have I, as you’ll see.) The history of the creative arts at the Chelsea as elsewhere represents a cumulative progression, and we inherit the sins of our artistic forebears.

But hey, not to sound too gloomy, most of us here at the Chelsea have a sense a humor about our existential plight.We may all be nuts, but we still have a good time in spite of, or maybe because of, our infirmity, and I trust this comes through in my stories.

Although the book could have been structured in any one of several different ways, I chose to use a journal form in order to highlight the changes the hotel has undergone in the twelve years Debbie and I have lived here. Basically, from the mid-nineties to today, the Chelsea went from a junky-infested flophouse to something that could almost be called gentrified. Almost, but not quite. Though I wrote most of the stories in the past couple of years, I was able to date them fairly accurately using my notes from those earlier years. The result, a mix of history and biography, myth and legend, fiction (including such ghost stories as “Harry and the Zombie” and “Chelsea Séance”) and nonfiction, memoir and anecdote, can most accurately be described as an “alternative history” or perhaps a “history of an idea,” the idea being, of course, that of the Chelsea Hotel itself.

Back in the lobby on the night of the fire, it quickly became apparent who had started the blaze. Sitting in a chair behind the front desk was our telephone operator, Shirley Kelly, crying and blubbering incoherently. Though she was wrapped in a kimono, no doubt donned hastily, she had still somehow managed to escape with her trademark wig and her makeup intact. I hadn’t seen her come down the stairs; she just suddenly, weirdly, appeared behind the desk, and was just as quickly whisked away to recuperate elsewhere in the hotel.

Shirley had been the nighttime telephone operator for as long as we had lived here. Irascible, frustrating, often downright rude when you spoke to her over the phone, Shirley was a true Chelsea piece of work. In her intricately coifed blond wig and her thick and expertly applied makeup, you could tell she had once been beautiful. Now in her late seventies, Shirley had worked as a performer on the old burlesque circuit and even, to hear some of the older residents tell it, as something a bit more scandalous even than that. She was certainly a colorful, salty character. She liked to drink and smoke and could often be seen on a stool at the bar of El Quijote next door, doing just that. In her tiny room there wasn’t anywhere to sit except on the bed, and she must have dozed off with a cigarette in her hand.

Debbie and I, and a few other residents, went up later in the night to look at Shirley’s room. Though the smoke had cleared out, a putrid odor lingered. Water was still streaming down the stairwell and standing an inch or two deep on the ninth floor, where the blaze had started. An old janitor was trying vainly to mop up the mess and cursing loudly as he did so; he didn’t say a thing to us as we waded through the flood. Shirley’s door was standing wide open, though there was some yellow caution tape strung up over the entrance. The room had been almost completely gutted. A blackened and burned-out mattress and box spring lay out of kilter on the floor. There were a few charred scraps of busted-up furniture and wood lying around. Shirley’s extensive collection of dresses and gowns and faux furs, which she stored on a rolling rack, had, strangely enough, not burned—a testament, I suppose, to the durability of polyester. All the items had been blackened, however, and everything in the room had been thoroughly soaked through by the fire hoses.

Shirley did come back to work maybe a week or two later, and she was her same old self again, complaining to all who would listen that Stanley—whom she alternately condemned as a ruthless slumlord and praised as the kindliest-hearted man in the world—had placed her in a tiny airless cell. Stanley soon moved her to a larger room, but then he decided it was too risky to have her around the hotel anymore. Some of us were angry over this, but Shirley had a difficult personality and there were others who had never liked her and were glad to see her go. I was one of the former, though upon reflection I guess Stanley did have a point there: Shirley couldn’t work much anymore, and perhaps it was time for her to retire to sunnier climes. Perhaps he felt he was just giving her the necessary nudge. She moved in with an older relative in Cleveland, Ohio; but, not surprisingly, that arrangement didn’t quite work out. One day Shirley just packed up her few belongings and moved out, and as of this writing we’re not sure where she ended up after that.