When we asked Chelsea Hotel historian Sherill Tippins for a ghost story for Halloween, she sent us this essay by by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Flynn, a labor activist and women's rights advocate who worked for the IWW and helped found the ACLU, was national chairperson of the U.S. Communist Party, while she was at the Chelsea Hotel. Sherill writes:
"...here's an article from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that you might be able to use on the blog sometimes. It 
was published in the Daily Worker in 1939, when Flynn had returned to NYC from a retreat of many years to the West Coast. It seems she stayed briefly at the Chelsea around this time while looking for a permanent place to stay. Then she moved back to the Chelsea permanently in the 1960s, where she began writing her memoirs, as she predicts in this essay:"
"I Like a Hotel," Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sunday Worker, Feb. 19, 1939:
"When a committee puts me up at a hotel, I don't say 'Bourgeois,' scornfully. Not me! I luxuriate, because it doesn't happen often. I think 'Well, this is a sample of the future, what every woman ought to have, a room to herself and release from domestic tasks." I hope to see the day we banish washtubs, kitchen stoves and straw brooms to the museum, as relics of the past.
It's a grand feeling for a woman (I can't speak for the men) to get up in a warm room, no worry about the furnace; get dressed in your street clothes, not in an apron or housedress, go down to a breakfast you didn't cook. I return to a well-stocked desk, pen, ink, writing stationery. This has a little house on it, 'Where Washington refused a crown, 1776' (Newhigh, N.Y.). It inspires me to write.
The telephone doesn't ring incessantly, no doorbell, bill collector, laundryman, grocer, or peddler interrupts my thoughts. No lunch to worry about. (Is there bread in the house? Is the sugar all gone?) The bed is unmade—at home I'd stop to tidy my room before I start to write. My mother used to laugh when I'd clean the apartment, then rush to my desk and say, 'Now I must get to work!'
In a hotel room I read the Daily Worker and the Times thoroughly. I collect my thoughts. I do some neglected reading. I work on a special article. I get an early start on the column. I catch up on my correspondence and surprise my friends with letters. I do my work.
Somebody else will make the bed and wash the dishes. Service in a well-run hotel is professional, not menial. Work in homes is amateur by comparison. You can eat in the restaurant or in your own room. This room is clean, comfortable, yet bare of non-essentials.
I see lots of old ladies in hotels. People pity them. It's quite unnecessary. They enjoy it immensely. It's a sort of 'sit-down strike.' Many say frankly they are tired of households.
They don't want a place where the grandchildren are parked. Lots of grandmothers feel that way. Few can afford to avoid it. These always look happy, like little grey pussy cats, purring with contentment. They read, go to shows, play bridge—all the things they wanted to.
It's the way all old people should be able to live out their last years. Today it's only possible for a few. A comfortable hotel is a glimpse of the future rest homes for the aged and for mothers, when capitalism is no more. How heavenly it would be fore tired, overworked mothers! It gives us another incentive to socialize the world.
If I ever actually write the story of my life I think the publishers will have to stake me to stay at a quiet hotel. Page the International Publishers!"
No, it's not too scary, is it? The scary thing is how many times Flynn was thrown in jail for sticking up for her beliefs. But America (and the Chelsea) wouldn't be the land of freedom it is today without the sacrafices that Flynn and others like her made for us. Where is she in these troubled times when our home is being threatened? Surely Flynn's spirit still walks these halls. Maybe we can hold a seance. Ed Hamilton
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