Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

Return of the Slumlord

After the recent, highly disturbing commotion at the Chelsea Hotel, minority shareholder David Elder had retreated to his bungalow in L.A., 3,000 miles being what he figured was a safe distance from the scene of his hilarious public humiliation.  Having disconnected his phone and discontinued his mail service, he figured there was no way any of those pesky Bohemians could possibly contact him.  Finally beginning to relax after a week of looking over his shoulder and jumping out of his boots at the slightest sound, Elder was just sitting down to a steaming plate of Chef-Boy-Ardee spaghetti-and-meatballs when he heard a rather insistent rapping at his door.

            Peeking out from a crack in his curtains, Elder’s body convulsed in a spasm of terror when he spied the tiny, scowling woman, and he immediately lost control of his bowels.  It was Marlene Krauss, Harvard MBA, Mistress of the Damned.

“I see you in there, Elder!  You ratfink!  Let me in this minute!” Marlene screamed, hammering on the door with her fist.

            Elder dropped to the floor, crawled quickly across the room, and hid, shivering in fright, underneath his bed.  Cursing under her breath, Marlene found a shovel that the gardener had left in his wheelbarrow and used that to pry open the door.  Striding across the room, she reached  under the bed, got a hold of Elder’s ear, and, twisting it painfully, pulled him out from under the bed and up to his feet.  “Get your things together right now,” she commanded.   “You’re going back to be slumlord of the Chelsea!”  And then, wrinkling her nose in disgust, she exclaimed, “My God, you stink!  You’re riding coach!”

“Please, Marlene, don’t make me go back there,” Elder begged, trembling uncontrollably.  “You promised me I was going to be a high powered real estate mogul, but instead the Bohemians threw stink bombs in my face and poured water on my head!”

Glancing around, Marlene seized the plate of spaghetti from the table and slopped it upside Elder’s head.  “Get a hold of yourself!” she said.  “Be a man!”

“Artists, my ass.  Treat ‘em like the deadbeat scum they are.  Put the fear of God in them, and they’ll fall to their knees and grovel.  That’s the best policy,” Marlene declared .  “The only policy.  And while you’re at it, get rid of that tailor too.  I’ve got a plan to put a pay toilet in that space and make a real killing!”

Elder tried to slink back under his bed, but Marlene grabbed him by the ear again and stood over him while he packed his suitcase.  For his punishment, Marlene denied Elder the box lunch on the plane back, which was a big disappointment for him, since it contained a reconstituted turkey sandwich, carrot sticks, and a fudge cookie.  He would have surely starved, he reflected with pride, had he not had the presence of mind to suck the spaghetti sauce from his shirt.

Back in New York, Elder hesitated once more as he was getting out of the cab, and so Marlene, with the help of the bouncers from Star Lounge—who thought their tip quite inadequate--had to drag him bodily into the Chelsea.  “Don’t you make me have to come back here again,” Marlene warned Elder as she deposited him in the lobby.  “I can’t stand this godforsaken dump.” -- Ed Hamilton  (Many thanks to a tipster for the photo.)

Are The Elevators Fixed?

With the recent problems resulting from BD incompetently overloading the elevator some guests have written in to our blog to make sure they are running before they make the trip.  Well, we're pleased to report that they are presently running if not smoothly then at least some what jerkily.  But that is not the only problem to be encountered on the infamous elevators of the Chelsea Hotel.

Directed by Luke Joerger for Snap Films. Based on a story by Ed Hamilton from "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca." View other trailers here.

The Haunted Crack Den of the Chelsea

Susan and I went to a party the other night hosted by a fellow blogger named Trevor whom we met online and then started running into around the neighborhood.  It was already crowded when we got there.  Trevor, the host, told us that one of his friends was visiting from out of town, and he had sent him to the Chelsea Hotel.
     “But I’m not sure if he likes it,” Trevor said.  “He doesn’t know anything about the Chelsea or its history, and he’s just used to staying in regular hotels.”
      We ran into Trevor’s friend, Bob, a tall, muscular man in his thirties, later in the evening.  “Trevor tells me you’re staying at the Chelsea,” I said.  “How do you like it?”

“Man, that place is a dump.  I can’t believe Trevor sent me there, but I know he thinks it’s a joke.”

I told him you had to really be into the whole Bohemian trip to appreciate it.  “How much are they hitting you up for?” I asked.

“$260 a night!” Bob said.  “I know it’s New York and all, but I’m getting raped, aren’t I.  When they took me up to my room I just rolled my eyes.  I couldn’t believe it.  It was a crack den.  I started looking around for needles and used condoms and stuff on the floor.”

Susan and I both cracked up at this.

“But that’s OK, I can take it for a couple of nights,” Bob said.  “Let Trevor have his fun.”  He went on to say, however, that another friend of his claimed to have seen a special on HBO that said the Chelsea was haunted.  “He’s not telling the truth, is he?”

“Well, a lot of people think it is,” Susan said.  We then went on to tell him about Sid’s ghost, Thomas Wolfe’s ghost, the Betty Boop ghost, Larry the hipster ghost, and the various other famous spectral manifestations of the hotel.

“How do you people know so much about this?” Bob asked suspiciously.

We explained that we had lived in the Chelsea for 13 years.  And since he seemed interested, I also took the opportunity to mention that he could pick up a copy of Legends at the Barnes and Noble, or at any other fine bookstore near him.  Some times we had to shout over the din of the music and conversation, but Bob definitely got the gist of it.

“Shit,” he said.  “$260 a night to sleep with a ghost!”  He told us about how when he was a kid he had moved with his parents into a big old house where he heard mysterious noises that he attributed to ghosts.  “They made the heating ducts creak, and opened doors when no one was standing there.”

I guess it was at about this time that it occurred to both Susan and I that this guy was really, seriously afraid of ghosts—though certainly the realization had been building all along.  Maybe we should have tried to reassure him, but we couldn’t help ourselves: it was too much fun to string him along.

“What floor are you on?” Susan asked.

“Why, does that matter?” Bob asked in turn.

“Some floors are more notorious for psychic activity,” I said.

“Uh, the first floor,” Bob said warily.

“Oh no!” both Susan and I exclaimed.  “That’s Sid’s floor!”

“Oh my God,” Bob said.  “I knew there was something wrong with that floor.  There’s that painting of that scary lady who looks like she’s looking at you, right when you get off the elevator.”  (It’s by Hawk Alfredson.)  “I should have turned right around and walked back out as soon as I saw that.  I’m not scared of anything—any man.  I train fighters for Bodog fighting.  But you can’t fight a ghost.  A ghost is not rational.  He’s not gonna spin me around or anything is he?”

“Nah, I doubt it,” I said.  “Sid usually just stops the elevator and gets on or off.  Of course he’s got a bad reputation because of that dustup with Nancy, but I’ve never heard of him bothering anybody.  Stanley says he was a nice, polite young man.”

Bob was far from reassured.  Later that night, as were waiting for the elevator to leave, we heard him out in the hallway taking to his girlfriend—or rather yelling at her—over his cell phone: “There’s this guy here who WROTE A BOOK ABOUT THE HOTEL, and he says it’s haunted!  I’m gonna kill Trevor!  He screwed me!  I’m gonna check out and send him the bill!”

Bob had made the mistake of telling us his room number, and so when we got back to the hotel we left a note under his door:

Love Kills – Sid V.

But that’s not all.  When we got up to the first floor and started to go through the glass door into Sid’s wing to deliver our note, there was a drunk guy up on the second floor hanging over the railing and when he saw us he started raving, “Don’t go in there!  I’m scared of that floor!  I know what happened down there!  You couldn’t pay me to get off on that floor!”  These things tend to cluster, I suppose.  Or maybe there was a full moon that night.  We heard the drunk guy stalking around on one of the floors above as we got on the elevator to ride up to our floor, and wondered if he’d still be around when Bob got back to the hotel. -- Ed Hamilton

    

Who Could Hate the Chelsea?

There was a German couple staying next door to us in the transient room.  One afternoon I ran into the man coming out of his room, and I said, “How are you enjoying your stay here at the Chelsea?”

            “Oh, it was great until yesterday, when my wife packed up and went back to Germany without telling me.”

            “Wow! That is a bummer,” I said.  “Did she not like New York?  I know it can be very fast-paced and intimidating.”

            “She liked New York fine.”

            “Then maybe it was the hotel.  You know, there are some people who really hate it.”

            “No, she loved the hotel,” the man said.  “I think it was just me.” -- Ed Hamilton

Smoking Crack in the Elevator

“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

CRAZED SIMIAN WREAKS HAVOC AT CHELSEA HOTEL

It was like the Murders in the Rue Morgue, only at the Chelsea Hotel.  On August 15, 1922, the diabolical Finnegan escaped from his cage in a pet store at 256 West 23 St.  After a jaunt across various roofs and flag poles and other high points of the area, he scaled a drain pipe at the Chelsea Hotel and entered a window.  Over the course of the rest of the day he roamed the hotel and the neighborhood at will, apparently traveling between rooms at the Chelsea by means of the balconies.  By nightfall his crimes included the killing of two birds belonging to the manager of the Chelsea Hotel (no it wasn’t Stanley—he’s not quite that old), the theft of two ears of corn from a neighborhood vendor, and the frightening of several women.  By the next day, the rogue was still at large.

            It took one of New York’s Finest, Policeman Ernest Freeberg, to subdue the dangerous miscreant.  The officer tracked the monkey to an apartment in one of the upper floors of the Chelsea Hotel, and was able to trap him inside the room before he could flee through the window.  As reported in the New York Times, the following hair-raising struggle ensued:

"Freeberg jumped for the animal just as the monkey jumped for him.  They met in the center of the room.  The monkey got the better of the first encounter.  It caught the policeman’s fingers in it’s mouth and for a few minutes the room was filled with monkey and policeman.  After the first break both sides sparred for an opening and in about the third round Freeberg, with a right uppercut to Finnegan’s jaw, put the monkey scientifically to sleep."  (New York Times, Aug 17, 1922)

While he had the chance, Freeberg stuffed the momentarily unconscious Spawn-of-Satan into a handy pillow case and delivered the soon enough writhing, shrieking bundle to the West 30th Street police station, where it was entered into the log: “One monkey, two feet high, color brown, name unknown, disposition terrible.”

            While it’s unknown if Finnegan ever returned to the Chelsea in life, in recent years there have been tales of a particularly ill-tempered little phantom scratching at the ankles of tourists on dark, moonless nights.  Such is the psychic pull of the fabled hotel, undiminished even by the grave. -- Ed Hamilton
(Editors Note: This is a story that Ed wanted to include in his book, but he forgot.)

Book Mentioned on Howard Stern as Goof

  It came as a strange but pleasant surprise when a friend from San Francisco told me that my book had been mentioned on the Howard Stern Show.  The occasion was that Artie Lange had given it to Richard Christy as a Halloween present.  (Thanks, Artie)
     Though they didn’t mention my name, they discussed Sid & Nancy and Dylan Thomas and the 17 whiskeys, and so the book got over a minute of air time – whoo hoo!  One thing that disturbed me, however, was that Howard said the gift wasn’t a goof.  Let me assure you that my book is indeed a goof!
     In a sense anyway.  The book is filled with humor and I’m sure the Howard Stern show is responsible for at least some of it.  I listened to the show quite frequently when all this madness was going on, and I only stopped listening in later years because I couldn’t get any work done with it on.  Maybe with my royalties I’ll get a Sirius radio and listen again – though I doubt they’ll pay me enough.

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.]

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

 

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.]

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

Sid's Room

Today is the 29^th anniversary of Nancy Spungen’s brutal murder in room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel. Whether or not you believe Sid killed her, the spirits of this tragic, doomed couple continue to haunt us here at the Chelsea.  When the elevator stops mysteriously on the 1^st floor, the door opening upon an empty hallway, resident’s joke nervously that it’s Sid’s ghost getting on.  But we are haunted by their lingering presence in other, more insidious, ways as well.  This video, shot in 2006, tells the story of punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone’s disturbing late-night encounter with the shadowy trace of the horrific event that occurred in room 100 way back in 1978.
Credits: Snap Films, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel

From the Annals of Trashpicking: A Curious Joan Crawford Letter

Several years ago I was walking on West 15^th Street in Chelsea when I saw a bunch of workers hauling out bags of trash and heaving them into a huge green dumpster.  I knew they had to be throwing out something good, since there were already several people in the dumpster rooting around, and even more had gathered on the sidewalk to sort through what those inside were handing out to them.
            It quickly became apparent that an elderly woman, until recently living in a nearby building, had either died or been sent to a nursing home, and now the workers were clearing out her apartment. Obviously the woman must have been a serious packrat, on the order of the Collyer brothers (though wealthy and literate), because the dumpster was about a third full with papers and various junk, and more was being added by the minute.  Unable to resist, I jumped inside, found an old suitcase, and commenced to fill it up.

            It turned out that the people standing around were paying homeless people to climb in there and find stuff for them, so I had a lot of competition.  What people were mainly after turned out to be the letters (they wanted the stamps, actually), and the albums (the woman had compiled very neat albums of little paper mementoes from all over the world, such as holy cards and wine labels, etc.), but I found her and her husband’s passports (they had traveled extensively, to put it mildly), her high school yearbook from 1927, old photos of her ancestors(including a tiny album of miniscule tintypes), and, most bizarrely, a little box containing a carefully wrapped slice of mummified wedding cake.

And the letters.  There were so many letters that, even with all the competition, I managed to scoop up hundreds of them, some dating as far back to the early years of the 20^th century.  I glanced at a couple from the 1950s: in one, the woman’s mother bitches about a relative who won’t get a job; in another, the woman’s son, away at boarding school, warns his little brother to stay out of his room or he’ll throw out all of the little brother’s toy’s—including his train set!—when he returns.  I found out that the woman had once been an aspiring actress, and that her husband was an executive for PepsiCo.  I figured it would be a worthwhile project to read through the letters and attempt to reconstruct the lives of the old woman and her family.

And that’s as far as it went.  I put the suitcase in the back of a closet and left it there for four or five years, until recently, cleaning up the apartment, I came across it.  I still didn’t have the patience to read all the letters as I had planned, but I went through and tidied them up, and in doing so, a blue envelope caught my attention due to it’s color.  Printed with the name JOAN CRAWFORD at the top in all capital letters, and dated January 8, 1959, the typewritten letter reads:

Darlings, R. . . and T. . .,

   Bless you, and thank you so much for your good New Year wishes and your thoughtfulness in sending the cablegram to us.  This is the way the cable turned out, and we are sending it back to you for you to see.

   Incidentally, it was the greatest “Jew Year jet” we ever had, and we hope you are having the same.

   We adored Puerto Rico, and stayed an extra week, coming back here today – all tanned and rested.  The Dorado Beach Hotel has the most magnificent stretch of beach I have ever seen, and it’s so peaceful and quiet.

   God bless – and all of us send our love to you.

                                                   Love,

                                                   Joan and Alfred

As promised, the cablegram was included with the letter; though the date is illegible, it reads:

MR AND MRS ALFRED N STEELE HOTEL DORADO PUERTORICO WE WISH YOU FOR YOU THE FULLEST AND MOST FRUITFUL JEW YEAR JET

R. . . AND T. . . M. . .

Naw, it couldn’t be that Joan Crawford, I thought.  But, thanks to the internet, it didn’t take long to determine that the famous actress had indeed been married to Alfred Steele, at the time Chairman of PepsiCo, and that furthermore, Joan had served on the board of PepsiCo after his death.  Several of Joan’s letters were reproduced online as well, all on the blue stationary that she used throughout her life.

I had got myself all dirty and sweaty rooting around in that dumpster in the heat of summer, had myself mistaken for a homeless man by the more respectable members of our community, endured the opprobrium of my girlfriend for bringing home trash, and sacrificed valuable closet space to a dubious project, but this weird little insight into the life of a great actress whom we’ve all admired from afar for so long, and which had been buried for 48 years (and which by all rights should have been lost for eternity) somehow made it all worth it.

Which still leaves one question unresolved: was the misspelling an honest typo, or was a rogue telegraph operator attempting to send Joan Crawford an obscure anti-Semitic slur?  At this late date it’s probably impossible to determine with any degree of certainty.  -- Ed Hamilton

More Trouble in Room 100

     We haven‘t seen hide nor hair of Chelsea Hotel layabout/board member David Elder in about a week.  Here’s what happened.  For all of these years Sid Vicious’ ghost has remained content to play games such as stopping the elevators on the first floor and holding the door open.  If he’s feeling really spiteful he’ll make the elevator stop on every floor while he jumps off to go looking for Nancy.  And Nancy’s ghost, as far as we know, has simply been bidding her time until she was summoned by Sid.  But apparently something of cosmic significance must have happened in this building last Monday which allowed the ghosts of Sid & Nancy to reunite and run David Elder out of the hotel. 

     Anybody who we’ve ever talked to who knew Nancy says that she could be a real bitch, so just imagine what her ghost would be like.  She’s been laying in wait in that bathroom for two months listening to David Elder’s scheming to screw over the Bard family and Piri Thomas.  All of those prank phone calls that Ol’ Snake Eyes was getting at 3:00 in the morning was pissing her off too.  She didn’t mind the dead fish head that somebody left outside Elder’s door so much, but apparently she stepped in the dog poop and that really set her off.
     Posing as Elder’s girlfriend, the succubus Nancy came to him in bed one night promising to fulfill all of his deepest darkest desires. Unfortunately, David was too unimaginative to come up with any, so Nancy pulled the hunting knife from her gut and chased him naked and screaming down the hall.  Sid, hanging out in the hall, was last heard screaming, “At least bring me back a pack of fucking cigarettes you wanker!”  The shaken Elder sent the bellman up to retrieve his belongings and to mollify Sid with a carton of smokes.

     Some of the more skeptical among you may say that, no, actually all that’s happened is that David Elder has hopped on a plane back to LA, where the judge is scheduled to rule if he is fit to administer Piri Thomas’ trust (The judge will also decide if David Elder is fit to walk among humans.). -- Ed Hamilton

Confusion Reigns at the Chelsea: Even the U.S. Mail is No Longer Sacred

Tuesday afternoon there was a sign in the Chelsea Hotel elevator:

TO PREVENT ANY CONFUSION PLEASE BE ADVISED THAT BD HOTELS IS NO LONGER THE MANAGING AGENT OF THE CHELSEA HOTEL.  ALL INQUIRIES SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO DAVID ELDER, OFFICE OF THE MANAGER. 

     I went downstairs to see what it was all about and saw three of my fellow residents discussing the flyer in the lobby.  “Everybody got them in their mailboxes,” Rupert said (name changed—I hope nobody here is named Rupert).  “You should have one in your box, too.”  They all wondered whether or not what it said was true.  “What is this, amateur hour?” Rupert asked. 

“It can’t possibly be true,” I said.  “Elder’s not qualified to pick out his own socks.”

I went up to the front desk and had one of the bellmen get my letter out of my box.  “What’s the meaning of this,” I asked the smiling young man who appeared to be in charge.  (He turned out to be Glendon, the new Director of Operations.)

“That’s a hoax,” Glendon said, and snatched the letter out of my hand and threw it in the trash.

“Give that back,” I said. 

“No, it stays in the trash,” Glendon says. 

“You can’t just steal my mail and throw it in the trash,” I said.  (It had come through the U.S. mail, stamped and postmarked.)

“It’s your mail but it goes in the trash,” the bellman broke in.  (The staff must take a lot of heat due to these confusing signs.)

I kept arguing and finally Glendon realized I wasn’t going away and so got the letter out and handed it back to me.  (I think he was also worried that I was causing a scene in front of some transient guests.)  “I know you’re the one who writes that really ha ha funny blog,” he said. 

“No, it’s ha ha really sick,” I corrected him. 

“Yeah, you’re right, it is sick, he said. 

“So who are you, anyway,” I asked. 

Glendon introduced himself and shook my hand.  “I’m trying to meet all the people in the hotel.”

“Good luck.”

“I hope we’re not going to have any trouble,” he said. 

“Just so long as you don’t throw anybody out on the street,” I replied.

“Oh we’d never do that,” Glendon said. 

I went back and told the other residents that the letter was a hoax.  “I asked the new guy, Glendon,” I said.  “Have you ever met him?”

“No,” Rupert said, “I don’t interact with any of these people.  Is Donald Trump running the hotel now?  Is that guy one of his apprentices?”

‘If he wins he’s really gonna get a booby prize,” I said.

Though my exchange with Glendon was all fun and games since he did eventually give back my mail, it has come to our attention—though we haven’t yet verified it--that someone from BD Hotels may have been throwing away more of these letters, apparently taking them from residents boxes before they had a chance to read them.  This would represent a serious breach of trust, and an abuse of power, not to mention being (in our understanding) a federal offense.  We hope that this rumor is not true. -- Ed Hamilton

Revelatory Work

Where have all of the revelatory poets gone,
long time passing? 
Where have all the revelatory poets gone
long time ago?
Where have all the revelatory poets gone?
Replaced by BD Pod People every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Credits: Legends of the Chelsea, Snap Films 

Luca Brasi Sleeps with the Shrimp Tails and Lobster Shells (The Blog's Response to the Observer's Story)

“Oh my God!” thought David Elder as he sat in his purloined office at the Chelsea Hotel.  “My strategy of befriending the members of the Chelsea community doesn’t seem to be panning out.”  Elder had just tuned in to the blog to see that we had reported on his recent attempt to (in our humble opinion) defraud his stepfather, author Piri Thomas, of $1.2 million.  “The old man will be dead in a couple of years anyway,” Elder thought indignantly.  “What the hell does he need money for!?” 

But Elder was not without a conscience, and soon enough, the enormity of his foul deed overwhelming his tiny brain, he sunk into self pity and wallowed around there for awhile.  “Born and Druckier said they’d make me a billionaire real estate tycoon!” he whined aloud.  “They didn’t say that nobody would like me!”

But Elder was quick to rally his defenses.  He had been watching The Godfather the night before, and all at once a brilliant idea to get sympathy struck him like a bolt out of the blue.  He ran next door to the El Quijote, all the way through the dining room and into the kitchen, where he began to root around in the trash can behind the dishwashing machine.  Sorting through the slimy mess, with a whoop of triumph he soon extracted his prize.

            The mailman, who arrived the next day, was less than enthused.  As he pulled the soggy, dripping, poorly wrapped package from his mailbag and handed it across the front desk, the mailman, who was perhaps Italian, or who had at least watched the movie more closely, declared, “It’s supposed to be a raw fish, you meathead! Not a half-eaten cooked one with a bunch of sauce and gravy all over it!  And Mama Mia!  Put it in a plastic bag or something so it doesn’t get all over the other mail!”

Elder ignored the unprovoked film criticism.  “Ooooh, a package for me!” he exclaimed, trying his best to act surprised.  “How wonderful!  What could it be?” 

As he unwrapped it, or rather as it fell apart in his hands, he thrust it out at arms length and grabbed his heart.  “Holy Mackerel!!!” he cried in mock terror.  “Mercy me!  The Saints preserve us!”

            Bearing the reeking, sopping mess before him, Elder ran out from behind the desk, green beans and a stray potato skin trailing off onto the carpet.  “Stanley, Stanley!” he cried.  “Look, look!  Those evil Bohemian mobsters sent me a fish in the mail!”

“That’s terrible, David,” said Stanley, characteristically unconcerned.  “Why don’t you go out on the street and get some fresh dog poop and put it in front of your door as well.  That’ll really show ’em!”

EXTRA:

            In related news, Born and Druckier are laughing their asses off because they were able to get this stooge to take the heat off of them while they work on more important matters—like how to throw us all out into the street and chop up the rooms into cookie-cutter boxes to maximize floor space. -- Ed Hamilton

A Tribute to the Old Ways

Film producers will be knocking down David Combs door to get him to star as a young Stanley Bard in their upcoming film about the greedy Lovecraftian scum that took over the Chelsea Hotel.

Credits:  Legends of the Chelsea, Snap Films, View More SOL Videos Here

Terror Abounds at the Chelsea Hotel

Tourists beware, if you aren't careful, your first night at the Chelsea Hotel could end up like this.

Credits:  Legends of the Chelsea, Snap Films

Dimwit Dipshit Diners in Dumbo: Don’t Try This in Manhattan, Kids

Susan and I went to dinner in Dumbo with a couple of our friends last Sunday night.  We don’t get out of Manhattan much and so it was the first time we had ever been to Dumbo, a gritty though charming industrial area, dominated by the overpasses of the two old bridges.  Among the drawbacks, the air was a bit polluted, and there was a constant hum of traffic noise.  A few new condo towers had been built or were under construction—let’s hope they are hermetically sealed.  We browsed in a nice, spacious used bookstore—the kind that are disappearing from Manhattan, then went down to the waterfront and watched the sun setting over the Manhattan skyline.  Everybody besides us was waiting in line for either pizza or ice cream.
     We didn’t have any specific restaurant in mind, so we rolled the dice and went into a place called Five Front that looked nice.  It was at this point that things became interesting, if not exactly pleasant.

There were some boorish showoffs sitting at the table next to us, a party of about seven or eight, mostly men, including one older man who seemed to be the chief showoff and said he was in the restaurant business.  (Yeah, right.)  They were talking loudly (perhaps for our benefit) about Sandy Koufax and old time baseball—which seemed inane to me, though perhaps its a good way to show how much trivial information you can stuff into your brain—and so I quickly tuned out their conversation.  Service was a little slow, however, and after awhile I noticed that they were bitching about it in raised voices.

Finally, when their food came, it turned out the waitress had messed up one of the entrées—so they claimed.  They all attacked her—especially the old man--saying, among other things, that she wasn’t good enough to be working there.  (Let me emphasize that this wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a four star restaurant, and of course it wasn’t even in Manhattan. It was just a standard, slightly upscale, neighborhood eatery.  The waitress, a girl in her twenties, who was also serving our table, was perfectly nice, though perhaps a little bit inexperienced.)
         The waitress went to the kitchen to correct her error and then came back and said she didn’t think she deserved this abusive treatment for messing up just one thing.  She said maybe she wasn’t that good of a waitress, but she was trying her best.  Though she deserved respect for standing up for herself against these creeps, in response one of the men cursed her, saying “What is this fucking shit?!”

At that point, understandably, the waitress stormed off.  Even the other people at that table knew that cursing her was stepping over the line, and they told the man who had cursed her that he shouldn’t have done that.  An older woman who was with them got up and rushed to talk to the waitress to try to settle her down, and to head off what she thought might prove to be adverse consequences.  She put her arm around the girl and whispered in her ear, and I thought, well, at least somebody from that table has a shred of decency.  But then the old woman came back to the table and laughed about it, as if to say: “I took care of her, don’t worry about it.”  Her behavior now appeared slimy and sinister, and I was appalled.

The waitress refused to wait on them anymore and had to go down to the basement to chill out.  The rest of the wait staff took over the service of the table, and were unduly solicitous to the showoffs for the balance of the evening.

As the showoff party was leaving, the old man purposely knocked over a bunch of water glasses, soaking the tablecloth and the check, which he subsequently threw onto the floor—or maybe it got washed onto the floor by the flood of water.  He laughingly told the hostess, “You’d better clean this up!”  Then he turned to us and remarked, “It was just that kind of evening,” as if his purposely making a mess had been a fitting climax to the rest of his disgraceful performance.

Since the check, soaked through with water, was on the floor by our table, one of us snatched it up for a look.  $88!  (Tip: $16.)  And this was a place where the entrées were in the twenty dollar range.  The table had also had a couple of bottles of wine, and who knows what else.  They had obviously been comped for at least half their check!  I didn’t know who to be more angry with: the boorish diners, or the restaurant staff who had rewarded their obnoxious behavior.

            Now I know that this is a game that certain depraved people play, and that it’s difficult for restaurants to deal with since they don’t want to risk offending someone who might be making a legitimate complaint, but once the man cursed the waitress they should have said enough is enough—game’s over, you lose--and asked them to leave, or at least stopped serving them.  (I don’t think they would have been able to get away with this in Manhattan.) Customers are important, but so are employees.
           And so are the other diners.  Though the food was good—interesting appetizers including Zucchini blossoms, and entrées including tender, porcini-oil drizzled braised scallops—as was the service, and though I feel fairly certain that such deplorable shenanigans don’t go on every night, the incident definitely put a damper on our evening.  -- Ed Hamilton

Shattering The Mystique of the Glass Houses

More than 39 glass houses are set to go up along the High Line, but the biggest one of all is rearing its head on 6th Avenue at 24th Street. Remember to check back soon for more videos featuring your friends and neighbors. Credits: Legends of the Chelsea, Snap Films 

Sid's Room Comes Alive

It took us a while, but we finally figured out this whole video-on-the-internet thing that everybody is making such a fuss about. "Sid's Room" is the first in a series of short videos based on Ed's Slice of Life column.  You may be surprised to find that some of your friends and neighbors have cameos and even starring roles.  Stay tuned to the blog so you don't miss a single episode.  On the other hand, if you want the real story, we suggest you buy Ed’s book, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel.  Credits: Sid's Room, Snap Films.

Cream Cheese Sandwich:Comic Celebrates Her 60s Heritage

Rotund comic Stephanie Peters spotted a totally cool—no other way to describe it—gigantic psychedelic 3-D album cover of Cream’s immortal “Disraeli Gears” in the window of Dan’s Chelsea Guitars and just had to have it.  She was in town from Providence—I think that’s right—for the Last Comic Standing competition.

I was sitting up by the counter in Dan’s, interviewing him for the Chelsea Now article, and shooting the breeze with the regulars, when she walked in with her two-man entourage.  “So did you camp out overnight?” I asked.  There had been a gaggle of comics, clowns and funny men lounging up and down 23^rd street in the freezing cold weather since the afternoon before, hoping for a chance to showcase their tomfoolery for three minutes before a national TV audience.

“No, I had a private interview,” Stephanie said.  She was loud and brash—as a comic should be--but seemed like a genuinely nice person.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“Not so well,” she said.  “One of my judges was the comic Ant, and after my first joke he butted in and said, ‘You’re not just going to tell a bunch of fat jokes, are you?’  Can you imagine the nerve of that guy?!  All he ever tells are gay jokes!”

“You should have started telling a bunch of really mean gay jokes yourself,” I said.

She ignored me.  “What a jerk!” she bellowed.  “And it was a good joke too!  You wanna hear the joke?”

We all said we did.

“OK, here it is: I’m always trying to lose weight.  I’ll try anything.  So when they came out with this new diet dog food, I figured why not, I’ll give it a shot.  So I ate the stuff for a week, and I didn’t lose any weight.  But I found myself really beginning to like the smell of ass!”

Everybody cracked up laughing.

“You see!?  Funny, right?!” Stephanie said.  “See what I mean?!”

The Disraeli Gears poster, by an artist known as 3-D Bob (a long-haired fellow who turned up the next day, wearing two ties, a black one knotted over a red one), was rather expensive, and Stephanie was undecided as to whether or not she should buy it.  Dan drug a bunch more of the 3-D works out of the back: an Allman Brothers “Eat a Peach,” a Miles Davis “Bitches Brew” and a smaller version of the Cream album, to name a few.  They were all great, but the Big Cream was by far the most spectacular.

While she was making up her mind, Stephanie entertained us with excerpts from her comedy act.  She said that one of the things she would often do on stage was to remark that she was hungry and then extract a cheese sandwich—smashed and heated, almost grilled--from her ample bosom and have a bite.  This always went over particularly well when someone from the audience would agree to share the sandwich with her!

Still undecided, Stephanie left the store to walk around for awhile, and then when she came back an hour later she had made up her mind: she would take the big one! -- Ed Hamilton

Two-Book Party for Renowned Chelseaite

Stefan Brecht, who lives in the Village, kept a studio in the Chelsea Hotel throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties.  He says his first studio was very nice, but his second, on the 10^th floor, had a huge hole in the floor.  His friends included the avant garde filmmaker Harry Smith, and David Remfry and his wife Caroline Hansberry.  (Photo: Stefan & Bob Nichols)

I have a piece on Brecht’s recent two-book party appearing in last week’s The Villager.  Debbie and I both went to the reading, an Australian film crew in tow.  (They were filming a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel.) The crew had me wired like a stool pigeon for the event, but I don’t think I got anything scandalous, and anyway, unfortunately, I don’t have access to the tapes.  But here’s a few choice quotes (scribbled down by hand) on Stefan’s photographs of the 8^th Avenue sidewalk that I had to cut out of the final version of the article:

            When posed the question of whether of not Brecht’s photos represent a sort of historical record of the time, artist David Remfry—who shared Havana cigars with Brecht in the Chelsea Hotel—says, “No, they’re not a record.  The photos are focused on the moment you’re walking over that stretch of pavement.  There are not many clues.  They could be documents of London or Moscow or anywhere.” 

            And Susan Birkenhead, the Broadway lyricist responsible for “Jelly’s Last Jam,” says, “I look down at the sidewalk all the time.  I think maybe it’s because I have a dog.”  Birkenhead doesn’t think the 8^th Avenue sidewalk has changed physically since the eighties, though she does agree with her husband, Jerold Couture, that the sociological character of the neighborhood has certainly changed dramatically.

            On the other hand, fiction writer and activist Grace Paley, who has lived in an apartment on 11^th Street in the Village since the early 80s, says that when she first moved in there were no trees on her street.  While Brecht kept his eyes on the sidewalk, Paley was closely watching another physical aspect of the neighborhood.  “I always kept my eyes on the trees,” Paley says, considering the presence or absence of trees, and the extent of their growth, to be indicative to the health of a neighborhood.  “Back before that they never thought to plant a tree.  When I moved in they planted some of  the first ones on  my street, then they started planting them all over New York.”

            Most revealing, however, was poet Robert Nichols remark that the photos reminded him of Australian aboriginal paintings, which, though they look like abstracts, are actually maps of physical and spiritual landscapes recognizable only to someone who has grown up in that culture and that locale. -- Ed Hamilton (Photos: Mai Lei checks  out the book. Wally Shawn greets a fan.)

Rare Gay-Elvis Photo at Dan’s Chelsea Guitars

Dan Courtenay, of Dan’s Chelsea Guitars, located in a storefront of the Chelsea Hotel, is a fascinating character and a great story teller with a wealth of information on life, Rock and Roll, and beyond.  I hung out in his store a few times over the course of a couple of weeks to get the material for the article that appears in this week’s Chelsea Now.  Though I’ve lived in the hotel for 12 years, since I don’t play the guitar I had never set foot in the shop before.  But I would definitely recommend popping in for a look: the guys who hang out there are cool and laid back, and the shop itself is a visual feast, filled with all manor weird, wacky old stuff.

            One of the coolest items, which I didn’t really get to talk about much in the article, is a picture of Elvis at about 13 in a slightly homo-erotic embrace with another young boy who would become, in adulthood, the president of the Elvis Presley Fan Club.  Dan says that the photo was plucked from the trash of the communist building across the street when they cleaned out their basement a few years ago.  ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons came into the shop one time and spotted the photograph and flipped out, saying that it was one of only six known prints of that shot.  He said it was by a famous African American photographer, who, it turned out, had had his studio in the basement of the commie building.  Dan can’t remember the name of the photographer, so if anybody can help out in this regard, it would certainly be appreciated.

            All the curiosities in the store have stories behind them, you just have to get Dan talking.  Also interesting are the outsider paintings of such figures as Bob Dylan and Son House.  They were painted by a homeless man from Memphis named Lamar Sorrento.  Spike Lee filmed them to use in his movie “Summer of Sam,” and then wanted to get in touch with Sorrento to secure the rights.  Dan was able to locate him by calling a homeless shelter in Memphis.

            As for the three death’s masks that adorn the support beams of the store, the one of Christopher Walken is from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and was used to make a fake head to be chopped off and go rolling around the set.  The Paul McCartney mask was apparently made by a plastic surgeon—or so Dan believes.  I forget the story of the Vincent Price mask, but ask Dan and he may tell you if he’s in the mood! -- Ed Hamilton

The Cruel Message of New York

There was a toothless old man, probably a former junkie, staying in the transient room next door.  I ran into him coming out of the shared bathroom late at night.  “Where you visiting from,” I asked, stupidly.

“I’m not visiting from nowhere,” he said.  “I’m from New York.  Brooklyn, New York.”

            “How you like the Chelsea?”

            “I’m paying $125 a night!  Can you believe that?  And I’m not getting any heat!  That’s wrong, that’s illegal and that’s dangerous!” he raved.

            “Yeah, that sucks,” I said.  $125 a night was the lowest rate I’d heard in awhile, however.  I guess they know they couldn’t get any more out of him.

            “How, about you, what you paying?” he asked.

            I told him.

            “Man, you’re fucking crazy!  Oh, but I guess you’re not from around here, are you.”

            “No, I’m from Kentucky.”

            “Oh, a rube, eh?” he said, jokingly.  “Listen, my friend, they’re taking you for a ride.  You can get an apartment for much less than that.”

            “Yeah, I know.  But I kind of like it here.”

            “Hey, to each his own.  You getting any heat in your room?”

            “No, not much,” I said.

            “Oh, OK,” the old man said, relieved, “I thought it was special for me.”

            “No, I don’t think so.  Nobody gets any.”

            “I thought they were trying to send me a message,” he said.

            Yeah, like, get out while the gettings good.  Leave while you still have a chance.  But of course that’s the same message they’re sending everybody. You don’t have to be a paranoid former junkie to see that.

Ed Hamilton

Ed's Drunken Adventure

Check out this podcast that Ed recently recorded for TothWorld.  Ed reads his short story "The End of Sonny's Bar," a hair-raising tale of underage drinking and serious ass-whoopin' with a pool cue that was published in the Spring 06 issue of Limestone: A Journal of Art and Literature. First, Paul Toth reads a few letters from Arthur Rimbaud and promotes his forthcoming book--but don't worry, Ed is up next.  Paul is actively seeking writers and musicians to contribute to his podcasts. So, if you fit the bill send him an e-mail.

On a somewhat more sober note:

Pick up this week's issue of The Villager  or Chelsea Now for Ed's coverage of the Andy Warhol "Wake" at the Cynthia von Buhler Gallery.  Cynthia von Buhler and Anton Perich are shown in the photo at left.  I actually had a nice chat with Anton at a party here at the hotel Saturday night. He described how his bar-code-like image that was in the exhibit was created by a machine that he made in 1972.

Click through for the photo gallery from the event.

Disparate (Albeit Strangely Complementary) Reactions to the Chelsea Hotel

Two junkies were walking by the hotel one February evening—a skinny man with a drawn, skeletal face, and a fat woman with no teeth—both bundled up against the extreme cold, the man pushing a shopping cart loaded with scavenged junk.  Suddenly the man let go of his cart and darted up to the side of the building, bringing his face close and squinting to see the print on one of the bronze plaques that hung there.  “It used to say ‘Sid Vicious’ on here!” he proclaimed, spitting out the words with disgust.

II

            Three teenage girls, two of them tiny and thin, and one, a couple of years older, heavier, more punked out with blue hair and multiple ear-piercings, were ambling by the hotel, ill-prepared for the cold in only thin jackets.  One of the younger girls glanced over and saw the sign.  “Look!  It’s the Chelsea Hotel!” she cried out, excitedly.  “Oh, the Chelsea Hotel!” the older one exclaimed sarcastically.  “The Chel-sea Hotel!”  She proceeded to drop to her knees—clad in ripped fishnet stockings—and then to prostrate herself fully, arms outstretched toward the building in an attitude of mock-worship. 
Ed Hamilton

Fly Trans-Love Airways:Today's High-Falutin' Hotel Guest Demands Modern Amenities

Now I read that you shouldn't use hotel coffee makers because they could have been used to cook up methamphetamine.  No such problems here at the Chelsea, I can assure you.  I remember when Dee Dee Ramone used to blow the fuse several times a day trying to cook up whatever mind-altering substance he was shooting or snorting or otherwise ingesting in the room next door to us.  I would be typing away on my computer, la de da, when, Pow! out go the lights.  And my computer too, since it was an old one and the battery was dead.  And every time, Mr. Green, our neighbor on the other side, would stick his head out his door and yell, "You can't have anything with a heating coil, Dee Dee!!!"  The wiring is so old, you see, installed in the middle ages or whenever the hell this place was built.  Come on, Stanley, let's rewire the building.  These high-paying, hoity-toity guests you're bringing in here demand modern amenities.  It's high time we move into the Brave New World of 21^st century psychopharmacology!  Ed Hamilton

Up Against The Wall, Bohemians!

Two big, fat cops burst in the front door of the Chelsea, guns drawn.  They glance at Susan and I, sitting there in the lobby, but stride on past.   “Is this 222 West 21^st?!” the bigger of the cops calls out as they approach the front desk. 

            “No!” the shocked desk clerk replies. 

            “See, I told you,” the smaller cop says as they both re-holster their weapons. 

            “I thought for sure this was it,” the bigger one says to his partner. 

            “I told you it wasn’t,” the smaller cop reiterates.  Slightly embarrassed, he has already turned to leave. 

            The bigger one lingers at the desk.  “Are you sure this is not 222 West 21^st?” he asks the clerk again. 

            “Uh, yeah, I’m pretty sure,” the desk clerk says. 

            “Come on, lets get out of here!” the smaller one calls back.  Out on the street they get in their squad car, turn on the red lights and roar off into the night.

            I guess something like this is what happens when they blow away somebody’s granny in a botched drug raid.

            The scary thing is, they’re cops, so they’re supposed to know where they are, right?  This sounds even worse if you know New York, since 23^rd Street is a big, major cross-street.  It looks nothing like 21^st Street, which this far west is a quiet residential street, and nothing like any other street in the area, actually.

            OK, so their guns weren’t really drawn, but that makes for a much more dramatic story, don’t you think?  The next day we went around the block to see what was at 222 West 21^st, and it was—a police station!

            Sorry, kidding once again.  It was just a non-descript apartment building, without a lobby or a doorman, though it did have some ornate stone wreaths over the door.  It was about as similar to the Chelsea as 21^st Street is to 23^rd.  (Ed Hamilton)