Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

The Strung-Out Junkie Ghost of the Chelsea Hotel

He was the angel-headed hipster who dragged himself through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix.  He was the man who taught Bill Burroughs how to shoot heroin, and helped him grow marijuana on his farm in Texas.  His exploits are recounted in Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s On the Road, Burroughs’ Junky, and sundry other staples of Beat literature.  Con man, junkie, Times Square hustler, jailbird, and muse to the Beats, Herbert Huncke was also a fine writer in his own right, penning, among other works, the autobiographical Guilty of Everything, some of it written in a stall of a Times Square subway station.

Unlike the more famous Beats, Huncke was never able to make a living off his writings, and so his story is, in a sense, one of failed ambition.  He felt that he was the real deal, that these other figures were all to some extent poseurs, and that, perhaps due to his lack of an Ivy League education, his own work had never received the attention it deserved.  Always a gentleman, Huncke’s old age found him living in a tiny room at the Chelsea Hotel with a bathroom down the hall, struggling to maintain a quiet dignity in the face of failing health and the addiction that had dogged him throughout his life.

            Like all junkies, Huncke liked to shoot up in the bathroom and nod off while sitting on the toilet.  A private bathroom would, of course, have been ideal, but since his finances didn’t permit the extravagance, Huncke was forced to make do with the shared bathroom.  For the most part, however, this arrangement worked out fine, as Huncke’s neighbors and bathroom-mates knew his schedule and were respectful of his privacy and special needs.

            That was until the whores moved in.  There were usually three of these strumpets, though sometimes up to five, living together in a small room with a shared bathroom—Huncke’s bathroom.  They were all really young, teenagers in fact, except for their leader—a girl with one leg, the other cut off at the knee--who may have been twenty or so.  The youngest girl, who was fat and had a bad case of acne, looked to be all of about 16 and was no doubt a runaway.

            No stranger to the sex trade himself, Huncke had absolutely nothing against such “ladies of the evening,” and at first didn’t give their presence a second thought.  Though he did kind of wonder about the one with the stump, he soon learned that she was in great demand, a specialist, it turned out, esteemed for her singular endowment and thereby respected in her field.

            However, through some odd coincidence, some ironic quirk of fate, in all his time living in Hell’s Kitchen and Bowery flophouses, Huncke had somehow avoided ever having to share accommodations with such beings.  Perhaps if he had been subjected to such an arrangement at an earlier age--say in his twenties—he would have cleaned up his act and gone to dental school, or moved to New Jersey and founded a dry-cleaning dynasty.  But as it turned out, this deficit in Huncke’s lived experience would allow Destiny or Providence to exploit what can only be viewed as a sort of tragic flaw in a man who had for so long lived a heroic outlaw existence on the fringe of society.

            The whores were, to say the least, heavy bathroom users.  They were forever taking long bubble baths or fussing over their hair and makeup, either singly, or in teams. Besides that, Huncke soon noticed that they seemed to own, collectively or not, an incredible amount of lingerie—which makes sense when you think about it—which they rotated strategically, washing the various filmy garments out by hand and draping them to dry over the shower curtain rod, the sink, and the toilet, even hanging some over the mirror.         

            Even outside of that, it soon turned out that the bathroom was an integral part of their business operation.  They were in there constantly, because—barring the occasional twosome or (prohibitively expensive) threesome--when one of them had a john the others had to have somewhere to hang out for the duration, and it would have been rather inconvenient to bother putting their clothes on and heading down to the lobby.  Especially since their turn might come next.  Nor did they merely idle away their downtime: they took with them their cell phones—huge, clunky things at the time--and appointment books, and transformed the bathroom into their makeshift office.  In that way they were able to assure a steady stream of clients, one every half-hour, from afternoon until the early hours of the morning.

            The whores ran around in the hallway in their skimpy negligee, and when Huncke knocked on the bathroom door they often answered it fully nude, and though this might have made the whole ordeal bearable for a heterosexual man, Huncke was gay, and so it didn’t do a thing for him.  At first Huncke asked them politely if they would mind not staying in the bathroom for so long.

            “If you need in, just knock,” said the one-legged leader, cheerfully smacking her gum.

But they would mill around right outside the bathroom door in their faux-silken teddies and polyester nighties while Huncke fumbled nervously with his works.  If he took more than a couple of minutes they started banging on the door: “We’re freezing out here!  Come on, we’re in our underwear!”

            Huncke didn’t really want to get into a nasty argument with the women themselves, because, from experience, he knew that where there are whores, there are inevitably pimps, and he didn’t relish the thought of a rangy, gold-toothed young man lurking in the dark hallways to spring upon him with a knife.  At his wits end, he finally could think of only one recourse.  Though he’d never been a squealer, not even when it could have saved him from hard time in the can, he sucked it up and went down to complain to the management.

            The result--which Huncke knew in retrospect to be inevitable--was that the guys at the front desk acted like he was completely out of his gourd, like they’d never heard anything so crack-brained and loony in all their lives.  As they guffawed and rolled their eyes and suggested he check into a mental hospital, Huncke, disheartened, slunk back to his tiny room.

            Nevertheless, the management did do something about it: they called the whores and told them that Huncke had complained.

            Later that afternoon, dozing in his bed, Huncke was startled by a loud wooden thumping at his door.  Opening the door, he found himself confronted by the leader of the whores.  “Why do you hate us?!” she demanded, as two of her scantily clad co-workers stood behind her for back-up.

            Huncke started to explain that he didn’t hate them at all, that he just needed to use his bathroom sometimes, but she cut him off abruptly. “You’re just jealous because we’re young and beautiful!” she declared, her boob bouncing out of her negligee as she hopped in place on her crutch.

            “Yeah, and you’re just a shriveled up old man!” her co-worker with the acne, pointing at Huncke accusingly, added over her leader’s shoulder.

            After that, the situation progressed from bad to worse, ten times worse.  It may be an overstatement to say that the whores drove Huncke to his grave, but they certainly didn’t help matters, and may have hastened the progression of the illness that would eventually consume him.  After the confrontation at Huncke’s door, the whores made it a point of staying in the bathroom round the clock, smoking crack and eating their lunch in there, and, Huncke came to believe, even sleeping curled up on the floor sometimes.  Now they wouldn’t come out even if he knocked, but would simply shout back that he should use the sink in his room--or just go in his pants for all they cared.

            Thus the poor man’s last days on earth were transformed into a living hell.  In his final hour, Huncke had but one simple desire: to get into the bathroom to inject the one blessed substance that would ease the pain of his tortured existence, relax the iron bonds of consciousness, and allow him to slip seamlessly into the next metaphysical realm.

            Alas, the whores were laundering their lingerie.  Because his longing had been so intense, and because he died agitated and unfulfilled, Huncke was consigned to a Limbo, a lonely, shadow-infested, half-aware state between living and final oblivion—that finds its God-forsaken locus within the crumbling red brick walls of the Chelsea Hotel.

            Often the door to Huncke’s old bathroom will be found standing open in the middle of the night, and his old neighbors know that Huncke has been by.  Sometimes the door will slam shut, for no apparent reason.  The wind?  Perhaps.  But if you’ve stayed at the Chelsea for long you’ve surely heard the mournful wail, howling up from the black depths of the airshaft in the wee hours of the morning like some forlorn Bohemian banshee: “Get out of my bathroooooooom, you fucking whoooooooooooooores!” -- Ed Hamilton

[Editor’s Note: The preceding story is fictional: ghosts don’t exist; and even if they did, Stanley would never have allowed them—or for that matter whores or junkies—to roam the halls of the Chelsea Hotel.]

The Spiritualist Who Foretold His Own Death

Arthur B. Davies, an artist, made "spiritual" paintings--dancing nudes, etc. (See below.) He also traveled the world, collecting both ancient and modern art.  By 1928 he had crammed into every available space of his Chelsea Hotel studio more than a dozen Picassos, five Cezannes, four Matisses, and various other valuable works too numerous to mention. In 1928, his collection had grown so large that he expanded into the studio next door.

People considered him shy and reclusive, but in fact Davies concealed a scandalous secret, Along with his wife, Virginia, and many children living on his upstate farm, he had a second wife, Edna, and daughter in the city. His "city" daughter, Ronnie, went to school with the children of Davies' artist acquaintances, but because she lived under the false last name of "Owen," the adults did not know that her father was their friend. Aside from the two families, Davies and his beautiful young model, Wreath McIntyre, had been close since she began posing for him at age 14.  By the time he moved into the Chelsea, Davies had shipped Edna and Ronnie to Europe to avoid detection. He spent his time at the Chelsea with Wreath.

One day, Davies, who believed in spirtualism and the life beyond, consulted an astrologer who told him he would soon die abroad. Convinced that one's fate could not be avoided, he planned a trip to Europe

anyway. At the end of his last day of work with Wreath, he escorted her out of the Chelsea, turned to her and said, "I've never wanted anyone else to pose for me. It's been a wonderful fourteen years." Then he lifted his hat to her and walked away. Later that evening, he dined sumptuously with Virginia at a favorite restaurant in the city. The next day, he set sail for Europe, where his second wife, Edna, and their child were waiting.

Two months later, he was dead of a heart attack. His last words, Edna claimed, concerned a "great spiritual light which has come to me this night." In his wallet she found a scrap of paper on which were scribbled the words, "That light which never wintry blast / Blows out, nor rain nor snow extinguishes, / That light that shines from loving eyes upon, / Eyes that love back."

Edna had his remains cremated, brought them back to America, and presented them to Virginia--introducing herself and her daughter for the first time. Eventually, Virginia gained access to her husband's treasure trove at the top of the Chelsea Hotel, which she had never seen. After a life of hardship on her upstate farm, Virginia was amazed to find "an Arabian-Nights treasure trove" of abandoned works of art. She auctioned off most of the collection.  But she brought much of Davies' own work back to her farmhouse, where she burned a large portion of it, claiming that she considered it "unsuitable." That was quite and expensive bonfire, a New York Times reporter remarked.

Davies' works were included in the original collections for the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. But thanks largely to his first wife's mishandling of his legacy, his body of work rapidly dropped out of sight and lost much of its value.  The strange, sensitive, secretive believer in unseen vibrations and psychic phenomena had been unable to influence his own legacy from beyond the grave. – Sherill Tippins

[Most of this information comes from the book, The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies, by Bennard B. Perlmann, The State University of New York Press, 1998.]

New Piece of Crap to be Thrown Up at Perry and Washington Streets

     Born and Drukier are really running roughshod over New York.  Now they are proposing a massive 9 story glass hotel for the corner of Washington and Perry.   They already have two of their ghastly towers, the Meiers buildings, nearby at 173/176 Perry Street.  Additionally, they are responsible for the glass tower at 166 Perry Street. Why has it suddenly become open season along the entire west side of lower Manhattan?  West Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, the West Village, and West SoHo are all starting to  look like some crappy suburban office park.  (It seems like every single project that developers come up with is designed to be the biggest, gaudiest monstrosity they can possibly get away with.  Doesn’t it ever occur to any of them to build a modest, attractive building that a reasonable person would be proud to call home? ) Isn’t there room for human scale development or better yet, leaving well enough alone – anywhere in New York? 
     This kind of megalomaniacal insensitivity to all concerns of context, community, aesthetics, human sensitivity and decency – though patently typical of some New York developers – should be enough to raise red flags for anyone who lives at the Chelsea Hotel – also controlled by BD Hotels for the time being. We don’t want our building to go the way of the West Side of Manhattan.  -- Ed Hamilton  (Photo: Gothamist)

Welcome NY Times Book Review Readers

     Welcome to everyone who’s coming to the blog from the NYTBR.  I’m sure you’ll find much of interest here, including updates on what has transpired since the beloved Stanley Bard was ousted as manager over the summer.  In a nutshell, the long term manager and majority owner of the hotel Stanley Bard, was accused by the minority share holders Marlene Krauss and David Elder of being a bad businessman and forced out in a hostile takeover.  The bottom line is, the hotel had simply become too valuable and the millions that their shares were producing for them just wasn't enough.  They brought in glass tower developers Richard Born and Ira Drukier to manage the hotel.  And the bohemian vibe of the Hotel was forever altered as media outrage ensued.   We’d like to see the Bard family reinstated, and for that reason the attention generated by the review is doubly welcome.

    It’s nice to get a reviewer (Jeff Giles) who really knows how to write.  What’s more, despite some of his more critical comments (which I thought were more or less fair enough), he seems to really get where I’m coming from with the book, and the comic/tragic vibe of the hotel.  One correction:  the book is not exactly a collection of the blog entries.  About half of the material in the book has never appeared on the blog.  -- Ed Hamilton

 

Plight of Chelsea Hotel Still Buzzworthy

     Thanks to Chelsea Now for keeping the plight of our residents on the front page.  (Well, the second page anyway.)  They quote us in their buzz column this week on the anonymous Chelsea Hotel tenant who has his rent raised from the exorbitant $200.00 per night, to the near extortionate $315.00.  We have heard of two other similar cases since then, indicating a pattern of efforts to get people out. 

     We do need to clear up one misconception however:  The tenants in question are permanent tenants, rather than transients.  Of the cases we mentioned, the shortest term tenant had been in his room around 8 months, the longest almost two years.  Any tenant who has lived in a residential hotel for more than 29 days is considered permanent, and may well be rent stabilized.  Whether you are charged by the day, week, or month makes no difference. 

     We must stress once again that BD cannot simply call the cops and have you evicted.  They must go through a long, drawn out court proceeding that could take a year or more and may result in your rent actually being reduced and you being paid damages.  Please, don’t take our word for it: consult a lawyer.  If you feel you cannot afford to consult a lawyer contact the West Side SRO Law Project at 212-799-9638.  --Ed Hamilton

The Severed Hand

By 1920, the theatre district had moved uptown to Herald Square, except for a few bawdy houses and burlesque palaces that remained on 23^rd Street, and the neighborhood was getting a bit rundown.  The Chelsea Hotel, however, was still at or near its peak, the stained glass windows and plate glass mirrors remaining intact, the ornate woodwork not yet obscured by the thick layers of paint that would one day cover it.

Nadia lived in the Chelsea with her well-to-do parents in a large suite of rooms.  That’s where she was born, in 1896, where she grew up, spoiled like a princess, where the artistic spirit of the Chelsea grew within her, and where, enlivened by that spirit, she was inspired to learn to paint: delicate work in the Japanese style on sheets of silk cut from bolts her father, a successful silk merchant, sometimes brought home from the warehouse.

And the theatre district, in full bloom while Nadia was a child, was where she met her handsome husband, a playwright and song writer who sold his songs on the old Tin Pan Alley on 27th Street.  They struggled for awhile on their own, moving from rooming house to rooming house, but her husband was an alcoholic and, though he managed to avoid serving in the war, could rarely find work.  And Nadia’s paintings failed to sell.  By the late teens they had two children, and soon no way to feed or cloth or even shelter them.

Her father made Nadia a deal.  She and her family could move back into the Chelsea Hotel—there was an extra room for them—in exchange for housework.  It was a great deal for everyone except Nadia, but her husband convinced her to accept.  Soon she was single-handedly cleaning the large suite, cooking three meals a day for the extended family, and washing out by hand her incontinent and demanding mother’s underwear.  All the while her husband sank further into drink, and was soon unable to bring in even the paltry few dollars he previously was able to earn through his songwriting.

            Nadia believed that her father, wealthy as he was, could have helped out with the money, but he was a tightwad, and what’s more, he wanted to teach her a lesson.  The old man had warned her about marrying that good-for-nothing dandy, and now, like a stern prophet of the Old Testament, he declared from his moral mountaintop that she must reap what she had sewn.  Already stretched near to the breaking point, Nadia was forced to take in piece work to made ends meet.

Amazingly, with the brats squalling in the background, the incontinent mother calling for fresh underwear, and the weak-willed husband calling for more drink, Nadia still managed to snatch a few minutes here and there for her intricate art.  Unfortunately, far from consoling her, this only served to reinforce her feelings of bitterness and disillusionment, as she found that her hands lacked the power to translate her ideas onto the canvas.  Looking at the offending appendages, she saw that the house work had coarsened and calloused her palms, knotted and gnarled her knuckles, aging and discoloring her skin before its time.  Flexing her hands, the joints felt tight, stiff, the result of the exacting needlework she so loathed, and Nadia came to believe that she was developing early arthritis.  “I’m working my fingers to the bone!” she cried out in anguish.

            That was to become her constant refrain. The early twenties are the time of life when mental illness typically first manifests, and at one point Nadia had to be hospitalized for two weeks at a rest facility on Long Island for a nervous disorder akin to hysteria.  (No one could see anything wrong with her hands.)  But she was much too valuable to the household to be allowed any further leisure, nor was her father willing to part with any more money to pay “those quarks” their  “extortionate” fees, and soon Nadia was back at work, and almost immediately her problems returned.

Finally, late one night, the children asleep in their beds, her husband passed out dead drunk on the floor, Nadia was able to tear herself away from the washtub of soiled undergarments long enough to put the finishing touches on what was to be her masterpiece, a scene of cranes cavorting in the Bethesda Fountain.  With intense concentration she willed her ravaged hand to put the final subtle stroke to the ambitious silken creation.  Stepping back, she surveyed her work critically.

It was crap!  Enraged, she seized a huge pair of industrial shears that she used to cut the silk and slashed her painting to shreds.  And then, very deliberately, she wedged the sheers into the corner, placed her right wrist between the blades, and fell upon the handles with all her weight, severing her delicate hand.

She hadn’t counted on the pain: searing, unbearable.  Howling in agony, and knowing her time was about up anyway, Nadia rushed to the window, threw open the French doors, and flung herself over the balcony, plunging the five floors to her death.

Since that fateful night, Nadia returns to the Chelsea on moonless nights, hovering outside people’s balconies, waving her bloody stump, barred by some infernal power of cosmic retribution from ever again re-entering the hotel.  So if you ever see a ghostly shape flit by your window at night, it’s hair and gown billowing though the air, you’ll know it’s Nadia, come to reclaim her hand. -- Ed Hamilton (photo: bluehour)

[Editor’s Note: The names and details have been changed to protect the ectoplasmic.  Thanks to Sherrill Tippins for pointing us toward the March 6, 1922 New York Times article that inspired this story: there really was a woman who chopped off her hand and jumped out the window at the Chelsea, and if that won’t make you leave a ghost behind, I don’t know what will.]

Home of Bad Behavior Indeed:BD Website Looks Pretty Good, But Sweeps Old Man Under the Rug

The redesigned official Chelsea Hotel website is less cluttered and it’s much easier to use.  The focus is clear as well: make a reservation.  (We didn't try the registration tool but we hear it's still confusing.) But that’s a little bit disturbing, since it tends to de-emphasize the status of the Chelsea as a cultural institution.  People used the old site as much for information about the hotel as for booking rooms.

            Of course, some of the information on the old site was false—such as the claim that Thomas Wolfe wrote Look Homeward Angel while at the hotel (he actually wrote the similar-sounding You Can’t Go Home Again)—but BD has introduced its own errors into the public discourse.  For the record, Dylan Thomas did not die at the Chelsea: he collapsed here and was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, dying there.  Also, there’s actually no evidence that Eugene O’Neill ever stayed here, according to our sources.  (And get an editor: the history is clumsily written and there’s even a few misspellings.)

One thing that confuses me it that the site says that the hotel is a “cultural preservation site and historical building of note.”  I guess what they mean by that is that it’s a National and City Landmark.  It’s odd, since calling it by its more commonly accepted designation would seem likely to increase its appeal as a tourist destination.  But for some obscure reason (perhaps related to finance) they don’t want to call it by that name.

            There are a couple of errors in the section on restaurant reservations.  Neither La Chinita Linda (sadly, since it was great place) nor the Subway on 22^nd and 8^th Ave (in the old Allerton Hotel, another recent victim of gentrification) are in existence any longer.   They were both closed, I believe, before BD even took over the hotel.  And what about El Quijote?  Though we know BD wants them to vacate the premises, they are there for the time-being, and they have served the hotel and its guests and residents well over the years (70-plus!), so it seems downright un-neighborly not to mention them.

            The most egregious error, as well, is one of omission.  I’ve searched the whole website, and, unbelievably, there’s not one mention of Stanley or the Bard Family.  It’s hard to deny that, besides being one of the chief celebrities of the hotel, he had a little bit to do with making this place the unique artistic attraction that it is today.  So give the man his due.  What would be the harm in mentioning him? 

The Mad Baroness of the Chelsea Hotel

Today, our thoughts turn to Halloween.  Last year, we published a slew of ghost stories some of which were sent in by guest contributors.  We've got even more scary in store for you this year.  As Sherill Tippins admits, this isn't much of a ghost story, but it's still kind of scary since everybody in it loses their sanity. (And then at the end the whole country goes bonkers and gives women the right to vote!) It also features a dwarf:

In 1901, the glamorous Mrs. Frank Leslie moved into the Chelsea--probably onto the sixth floor. Born Miriam Florence Follin in 1836 to an old New Orleans family run to seed, she was rumored to be the
illegitimate product of a liason between the debonair, French-born Southerner Charles Follin and one of his slaves. Be that as it may, Miriam was raised by Charles and his wife as a precious flower whose beauty and brilliant intellect might, through a clever marriage, pull the family out of their economic decline. Tutored at home, she learned to speak and read in four languages, to dress to her advantage and charm well-born gentlemen with her quick wit and deceptive submissiveness.
     As she approached womanhood, the family moved to to New York, where the marriage market promised the highest return on their investment. They established a boarding house precariously near the slums of the Lower East Side. When 17-year-old Miriam allowed David Peacock, an older jewelry store clerk, to seduce her in exchange for the chance to adorn herself with the shop's diamonds, her parents efficiently arranged a shotgun wedding and then a quick annullment to preserve her reputation. Peacock ended up in an insane asylum, where he died.
     Miriam went on to perform onstage with a new mentor, Lola Montez, and then to become the mistress of a retired United States Senator, before finally making the marriage her parents had hoped for--to the famous archeologist and diplomat Ephraim G. Squier. But Squier was much older, and Miriam was bored. When the couple went to work for the even richer and more powerful Frank Leslie, founder of New York's Frank Leslie Illustrated Newspaper publishing empire, she encouraged Leslie's divorce and invited him to move in. For several years, the Squires and Frank Leslie enjoyed the era's most celebrated menage a trois, until Miriam divorced Squire (leaving him to go mad and die alone), married Leslie, and took over Frank Leslie's Illustrated after Leslie's death.
     By 1901 Mrs. Frank Leslie had become a multi-millionaire, building her late husband's business into one of New York's most successful publishing houses. She had dabbled in romance--marrying Oscar Wilde's drunken brother Willie and then returning him to his mother and filing for divorce; and engaging in a flirtation with the Marquis Campo Allegre Villaverde, Court Chamberlain to King Alfonso of Spain. But by the time she arrived at the Chelsea, she had decided to simply give herself the royal title she craved, without the bother of another marriage. She checked into the Chelsea as the diamond-bedecked "Frank Leslie, Baroness de Bazus," and began presiding over Thursday evening salons with her coddled Yorkshire terrior, featuring Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the "poetess of passion" ("Laugh and the world laughs with you/ Weep, and you weep alone") and Marshall P. Wilder, the well known hunchback, dwarf vaudeville performer who "broke the ice during dull afternoons" by hiding behind the grand piano and making baby-squalling noises until the others collapsed with laughter.
     As the years passed, rumors spread that the Baroness was losing her sanity. She forgot things, they said; her conversation drifted off in directions. The rumors increased dramatically after her death in 1914, when it was learned that she had left her $2 million fortune to the Suffragist movement. Family members sued; reporters sneered, the legal case dragged on. In the end, half of the legacy was wasted on lawyers, administration fees, taxes, and legal settlements. But about $1 million did go to the Suffragists in time for the final push toward ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. -- Sherill Tippins

A Cautionary Tale for the Chelsea

The history of The Windermere, that graffiti covered eyesore at 9^th Ave. and 57^th Street, parallels that of the Chelsea Hotel in many respects.  Both were built in the 1880s as a part of the wave of large, ornate luxury apartment houses that were built around the city after the invention of the elevator. Like the Chelsea, it fell on hard times in the early decades of the 20^th Century and was carved up into smaller apartments.   The Windermere too, while not enjoying quite our illustrious reputation in the arts, was home to numerous creative people by the 60s.

As reported in The New York Times (from which I drew most of this info) what happened to the Windermere was that in 1982 the landlord decided to empty the building of rent-stabilized tenants.  The present landlord continued the trend, letting the building run down to the point where pigeons were nesting in rooms open to the elements, finally forcing the city to close the place down and relocate the residents to an SRO.  The landlord used illegal tactics, but as of this point, he got what he wanted anyway!

I doubt that anything this bad will happen to the Chelsea, but it just goes to show that where money is to be made, landlords will frequently resort to any means necessary to get rid of rent-stabilized tenants. – Ed Hamilton

More Legends to Come

     The good news is, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel has been selling briskly at the Barnes & Noble at 6th Avenue and 21st Street.  Unfortunately, if you've been by there in the past couple of days, you may not have been able to find the book.  That's because they sold out.  But more are arriving, just in time for my reading on Tuesday, Oct. 23.  If you don't see any copies, ask for one.
     The book will be available in bookstores nationally very soon.  Watch for the review of Legends in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday, Oct. 28.  To read other reviews visit www.chelseahotelbook.com