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There must be a story behind Robert Lambert's latest painting. If you see him in the lobby chatting on his cell phone ask him what's up with Sid the Kid. Maybe next he'll paint Dylan Thomas and his 18 whiskeys.
“The new generation of bands, they’re all nice boys,” chirps a boutique hotel owner (“Just Call Our Band the Model Guests,” David Brown, New York Times, 11/25/07). Articles such as this appear from time to time--obviously based heavily on press releases from the hotel industry—trumpeting the end of hotel-trashing behavior. For you see, the guys from Led Zeppelin and the Who need walkers to get around these days, and the new generation of “rock stars” are more interested in gyms and spas and high-speed internet access.
As the article/press release says, these days one is, “. . . unlikely to encounter many bands with larger-than-life personas.” Which makes me wonder why anyone would give a rat’s ass about them. The function of rock stars in society is cathartic: to live the lives of speed and excess that the rest of us can 
only dream of—and that includes, obviously, throwing TVs from hotel windows. Of such behavior, a drummer from an obscure band with the hateful name of the Editors even goes so far as to say, “It’s not. . .respectful,” causing both John Bonham and Keith Moon to roll over and vomit (or dry-heave at least!) in their graves.
The purpose of such articles is twofold: 1. to promote the false worship of American-Idol-type stars, manufactured by the record companies because they are easier to control than actual, talented musicians, who inevitably carry the requisite baggage of inner demons to be exorcised; and 2. to sound the death knell of quirky old hotels with actual character, together with the ascendancy of sterile, soulless boutique hotels.
To the later point, the article contains the requisite predictions of the death of the Chelsea (which it calls a “party palace” and a “sleaze-rock emporium”), together with—something new—a bit of gloating over the fact that one of their own damned and demented breed, BD Hotels, has seized control of the revered counterculture Mecca.
Regrettable as that is, however, BD has not quite managed to snuff out our legendary life-force as yet, and so the real rock stars--albeit perhaps without major label support--will continue to make the pilgrimage to the Chelsea for as long as they can still slip in undetected. Though the new flat screens don’t have quite the POP! of the old tube TVs, they will still provide quite a spectacle when they come crashing down onto the newly gentrified 23rd Street.
And as for all those fancy-schmancy new boutique hotels: the fixtures will become old in time, and perhaps even develop some character; and because the lure of sex, drugs, and Rock and Roll will forever remain strong, with the power to corrupt even studio-manufactured lip sync-ers and air guitarists, the fine art of hotel trashing will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of its own too-hastily predicted demise. To this day our illustrious proprietor Stanley Bard will tell you that Sid Vicious was a nice boy too. -- Ed Hamilton
For our Japanese readers, be sure to tune in to Sekaigumi TV #9 tonight (November 28 - Fuiji TV Network) for a documentary on the Chelsea. A full hour long, this film, focuses on the history of rock music associated with the Chelsea, profiling Sid and Nancy, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, etc., and taking the viewer on tours of some of their former rooms—including the infamous bathroom where Nancy was stabbed to death in 1978 (since renovated, of course, though it probably still looks about the same as it did back then).
I was able to view an advance copy of the film, and, though I don’t speak Japanese, I still found it fairly entertaining. In particular, there was a lot of very good music playing throughout the film: Velvet Underground, Jimi, Janis, the Sex Pistols, etc.; and a lot of footage of Bob Dylan from the Newport Music Festival where he went electric. As I watched, I couldn’t help thinking that they must have spent a good deal of money buying the rights to all these songs. There’s a long segment on Harry Smith, who compiled the influential Anthology of American Folk Music, and his collaboration with Allen Ginsberg, as well.
The film also profiles current residents, including composer Gerald Busby, painter David Combs, photographer Linda Troeller and of course our illustrious proprietor Stanley Bard. They also talked to Mike the DJ about how it feels to live in Bob Dylan’s room. There’s also a segment on the blog, and I get to tell my story about meeting punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone, and how he subsequently challenged some construction workers to a knife fight (a version of this appears in my book, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel.)
The director and the various crew members kept asking me about Harry Smith’s recording of Allen Ginsberg’s folk songs, but I knew nothing of that and wondered why they even cared about something so obscure, but maybe, aft
er all, Harry is big in Japan. Nobody believed me when I told them that Harry kept a Zombie at the Chelsea.
The photo shows some of the members of the film crew, who were great fun to work with. They were jazz fans—or at least one of them was--and I showed them a poster from Shirley Clarke’s film about roformer Chelsea resident Ornette Coleman (obtained from a resident who lives down the hall and knew him back then). Noticing that I had several works of Japanese literature on my shelves, they were kind enough to recommend a couple of authors—Natsume Soseki (I read Botchan and Mon—both of which I greatly enjoyed) and Osamu Dazai, to round out my education. -- Ed Hamilton
Glennon finally got a clue and took his Myspace page down. But just because Glennon wouldn't be our friend on myspace doesn't mean that his friends don't want to be our friends. Quite the contrary they have much to tell us about Glennon and his various peccadilloes. One of Glennon's friends shot us an e-mail to let us know that Glennon is engaged to be married in June 2008. Congratulations Glennon! (Surely the bride-to-be wasn't embarrassed by that eurotrashbeachbum Myspace page!) Here's a link to the registry if you want to buy a gift. We noticed that the couple wants some bar ware items. From the pictures we’ve seen they're gonna need those high ball glasses for when those party animals Richard Born and Ira Drukier come to visit. But surely you can come up with some better gift suggestions on your own. Or just send lawyers, guns and money! 
When we got back from our Thanksgiving Holiday, the first thing we heard – before we even got through the door of the hotel actually – was an outpouring of resident appreciation for Chris Shott’s Observer article about the Chelsea’s supposed manager, 26 year old Glennon Travis.
Certainly it is a must read for anyone interested in understanding what’s going on at the Chelsea. One 
important thing that Shott points out is the perception that Glennon shows favoritism toward transients at the expense of permanent residents. Though this formulation oversimplifies the problem, as Glennon is actually nasty to transients whenever they express an interest in the history of the hotel, it points out BD Hotels ultimate goal: to rid itself of all permanent tenants as it converts the Chelsea to an exclusively transient hotel. They are using Glennon to alienate us so we’ll get sick of his bullshit and move out. (Photo: Richard Born and Glennon Travis)
It’s actually a master stroke of harassment on BD’s part, because, even without his abrasive personality, someone like Glennon is almost completely incomprehensible to any sort of creative person. Though I’m not generally one to brag, when I was 26 I was sitting at a table in a cheap rooming house, chain smoking cigarettes and banging away on an old typewriter as I drank myself into a stupor. For someone to squander his youth in the way that Glennon is doing – dressing in suits and writing memos – is to me a tragedy of unexampled proportions.
Glennon says to watch for the good stuff coming up. Though he is clueless in this regard, here’s what will most likely happen: In time, BD will hang Glennon out to dry, and then they will trot out a new, marginally more appropriate manager to “save” the Chelsea. Yippeee! And I’m sure there will even be a few people stupid enough to believe the hype.
On a positive note maybe this will be a wake-up call for Glennon, and he’ll take to the bottle – or alternately the needle – and with any luck be able to salvage what’s left of his misspent youth.
Oh, by the way, I’m pleased to note that Living with Legends is a now officially a “gossip site” we should get even more traffic now! -- Ed Hamilton
Fellow resident Lothar Troeller was warmly greeted on his return to the Chelsea after a recent hospitalization. Welcome home!
Wow, talk about an unrevealing interview (Hotel Chelsea by Brendon Lemon, Interview, 11/07). Though it’s good to hear from majority owner and former hotel manager Stanley Bard, and to see that he’s still upbeat and optimistic and hasn’t let his ouster get him down, he doesn’t say anything we haven’t heard before, and in fact when I first opened the magazine I thought I had mistakenly picked up an issue from 30 years ago. They trot out some of Anton Perich’s photos from the early 70s, as if no one has photographed the hotel since then. (In fact there have been three books of photos about the hotel, by Claudio Edinger, Rita Barros, and, most recently, by Linda Troeller; and another, by Julia Calfee, is on the way.) Bizarrely, there’s not even a photo of Stanley, probably because the only one Perich had was of Stanley in his 30s. About the only thing in the interview itself that tips you off that it’s current is Stanley’s startling revelation that his son (and planned successor) David Bard believes in the Internet!
For those of you new to the controversy, Stanley Bard, the majority shareholder of New York’s famed Chelsea Hotel, the man who created and nurtured the creative dynamic of the hotel, was ousted from his management role in June by the minority shareholders, represented by board members David Elder and Marlene Krauss, who accused Bard of financial improprieties. (Basically, in New York’s super-heated real-estate market, Bard simply wasn’t making what they considered a sufficient amount of money.) Krauss and Elder hired a corporation, BD Hotels, run by Richard Born and Ira Drukier, to make over the haven for writers and artists as a strictly money-making operation.
Admittedly, Stanley can be a bit secretive at times. But even the accompanying introduction doesn’t tell us anything, and seems to have been written at the end of June. It asks, “What would the change do. . . ?” as if it were all still up in the air. (Did it ever occur to the author that he might have asked someone who actually, presently, lives at the hotel?) Well, we now know what the change is doing: in accord with BD’s plan to remake the Chelsea as a transient hotel, long-term residents are being pressured to leave through exorbitant rent increases and other tactics, and no new permanent residents are being allowed into the hotel. (This is a virtual death sentence for the Chelsea’s creative community, as Bohemia needs new blood to survive.) Furthermore, although as stated in the Interview article, BD Hotels did indeed allow Stanley to hang around in the lobby (as a “Goodwill Ambassador”) for a few weeks after his ouster, he is now rarely to be seen around the Chelsea, and when he appears he is inevitably escorted by a board member who monitors his conversations.
The Interview article could have been a call to action for the artistic community. Instead, in effect it just pooh-poohs Stanley’s ouster and the subsequent corporatization of the hotel. Furthermore, showing old photos (and interviewing past residents like Betsey Johnson and Jean Claude and Christo) perpetuates the myth that the Chelsea had its heyday in the sixties and that nothing has happened here since. Quite the contrary, the hotel is still a vibrant place artistically. Among many films, music videos, and TV episodes that have been filmed here, in recent years The Interpreter was filmed here; former resident Ethan Hawke made Chelsea Walls; and director Abel Ferrera (The King of New York, Bad Lieutenant) is presently shooting a documentary about the hotel.
Musicians Ryan Adams and Rufus Wainwright both wrote albums while in residence; Patti Smith lived here in the late nineties and recently gave a concert in the basement club; and concert pianist Bruce Levingston, who frequently collaborates with composer Philip Glass, calls the Chelsea his home. Composer Gerald Busby lives here as well. As for the visual arts: Philip Taaffe continues to make great art in his tenth floor apartment, and recently had a show at the Gagosian; Julian Schnabel had a studio here until just recently; and well known painters such as Donald Bachler, Joe Andoe, David Remfry, and Michelle Zalopany, either lived here recently, or still do. Arthur Miller frequented the hotel up until his death in 2003, collaborating on a play with the late librettist Arnold Weinstein, who had lived here since the 60s.
Other residents of note include: fashion designer Zaldy; gallery owner Daniel Reich, who recently hosted a series of artistic events in the hotel’s grand ballroom; Warhol collaborator Victor Bockris, author of ten books on counter culture figures (and himself a recent casualty of the takeover); poet, art critic and Warhol figure Rene Ricard; party hostess Susanne Bartsch and her husband, fitness mogul David Barton; and Vogue editor Sally Singer, who lives here with her husband and three healthy children, one of whom, apparently, is planning a career as a rock-n-roll drummer. And that’s not to mention the scores of lesser-known, but no less photogenic and engaging, eccentrics, some of whom will no doubt be famous twenty years from now.
On the literary front, in addition to my own book, punk musician Dee Dee Ramone wrote a novel about the hotel, Chelsea Horror Hotel, Joe Ambrose is publishing a collection of interviews and essays, and a history by Sherrill Tippins is in the works.
My point is not to name drop, but to demonstrate the fact that, when Stanley Bard was thrown out and a corporation took over the operation of the Chelsea, it wasn’t just a musty museum of ancient history that was lost, but rather a living, breathing, artistic community like none other in the world. The Chelsea’s demise is only the latest chapter in the ongoing creative suicide of New York City. We need to pressure our politicians to strengthen rent protections and landmarking laws, and, in general, to stop favoring the profits of development corporations at the expense of community and diversity. As for the Chelsea Hotel itself, though it may be a long shot, we are still calling for the reinstatement of Stanley Bard. -- Ed Hamilton
According to an article in the City Review (Edward Short, 11/16/07), Ashcan painter John Sloan didn’t give a damn when NYU tossed him out of the old Judson Hotel at 53 Washington Square South. He just packed up and moved to the Chelsea Hotel. Also, according to the article, he didn’t care that the old buildings around New York were being torn down and replaced with skyscrapers.
This rather seems like an odd position for Sloan to take, given his fixation on the mundane and seedy details of the city life of his day, and particularly since the one quote from him, as the author notes, can be read as expressing a pro-preservation sentiment.
But Sloan certainly did seem to take a fancy to what must have been the monstrosity of the day, 1 Fifth Avenue, as he photographed it under construction and later painted it, rising in its gargantuan splendor over the low-rise town houses surrounding it, dwarfing the Washington Arch. Sloan saw at the time what few could see then but what most of us can see now: that 1 Washington Square is a really nice building.
So perhaps there’s a lesson in this for those of us who bemoan the recent spate of development that’s replacing hundred-year-old, human-scale buildings with soaring, futuresque towers of glass. Maybe, but I doubt it. 1 Washington Square is a stately, solidly-built construction with fancy Art deco touches, while most of these glass houses are just pre-fab, cookie cutter boxes made of the cheapest materials possible. 1 Washington Square is a structure that the architects and the builders took pride in, rather than just sitting down and figuring out how to cut costs. If, in 80 years, preservationists are fighting to save these glass houses from demolition, we will know that the architecture of the day has sunk to a previously unimagined low.
And maybe Sloan wouldn’t give a damn about what’s happening at the Chelsea these days either; he could just pack up and move. Or, maybe not: back then there were places to move to; this time there’s no place left in the city that’s even remotely affordable. -- Ed Hamilton
Photo: One Fifth Avenue under Construction, 1927
Photograph, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches
John Sloan Manuscript Collection, Delaware Art Museum
“There’s this guy staying on the other end of the hall,” Carla, the beautiful dancer, said as she passed me in the hall. “And he was smoking crack in the elevator!”
“And nobody said anything?” I asked.
“What do you think? Of course not,” Carla said. “And in the lobby!” she added. “You know who I’m talking about?”
I thought I did. “He’s a Southerner?” I said that because he reminded me of the guys I used to hang out with when I was a kid.
Carla considered it. “Uh, no,” she said, shaking her head decisively.
I tried again: “He looks like a garage mechanic?”
“That’s him.”
In fact I had run into the guy. The night before my power had gone out and so I put on my slippers and went out to the fuse box in the hallway. As I was resetting the circuit breaker, a goofy, manic guy, moving jerkily, burst through the door from the other side of the hall and bounded up to me. “Was some asshole messing with that?!” he said.
Though I didn’t have my glasses on, I could see that the man, in his early thirties perhaps, wore a trucker hat and a worn football jersey; his hair was greasy and scraggly and he sported a three-day growth of beard. A Southerner ironically, I suppose.
“I don’t think so,” I replied, puzzled by his question. “Did you see somebody messing with it?”
“Just you,” he said. “If nobody’s been messing with it, then what are you doing?”
“My fuse just blew.”
He popped his head up close to get a better look. “You want me to look at that?” he asked.
“No, I think I fixed it,” I replied, still wondering as to why he was so interested. “Did your fuse blow too?”
He didn’t answer. “I’ll get somebody who knows what the hell they’re doing to look at that,” he declared as the elevator arrived.
“Smoking crack in the elevator and the lobby!” Carla reiterated. “You’ve got to write about that! He told me he was paying $1000 a night in rent.”
That sounded even more remarkable. “I guess he’d have to be smoking crack to pay that,” I said. “But even so, he should be able to think of better things to spend his money on.”
Like, for instance, more crack. -- Ed Hamilton
If you're visiting the blog for the first time because you saw the segment on Channel 7 Eyewitness News this morning, welcome. 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. Media outrage ensued and the bohemian vibe of the Hotel was forever altered. We’d like to see the Bard family reinstated, and for that reason the attention generated by WABC News is doubly welcome.
In many ways, the Chelsea Hotel is a microcosm of New York. The city is encouraging luxury development at the expense of affordable housing, and middle class and working class New Yorkers are being priced out. Landmark protections and rent protection laws need to be strengthened if New York is to retain its diversity and remain on the cutting edge. Please let politicans know of your concern on these issues.
As far as the Chelsea itself, an important cultural institution is being destroyed because the new management company (BD) refuses to take in new permanent tenants, preferring instead to convert all rooms to transient use. The heart and soul of Chelsea Bohemia is the building's mix of permanent tenants and transients over a wide range of economic situations. In addition, rent-stabilized units are being lost. Once again, please voice your displeasure to your state & local representatives. You might also want to call the hotel, or even drop by, to complain. -- Ed Hamilton
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