Living with Legends

How does Stanely Bard do it?  He must receive e-mails like this by the dozens.  These people just want to be able to stay at the Chelsea for a couple of nights, for heavens sake!  Is that too much to ask? They’ve been saving their money and it’s their life-long dream trip. They seem to have a genuine appreciation of the Chelsea and it’s history. Here’s Illtud’s resume.  We had room for Dylan Thomas, surely we can make room for Illtud. Read his plea and offer your suggestions:

I’m scared of sounding like a real cheapskate but is there any way of getting a discount on a room at the Chelsea for a couple of nights? My girlfriend and I have booked flights to New York in February to celebrate building our own home (we’ve been in a knackered old trailer for over two years) but as we’ve splurged so much on the house we’re rather strapped for cash, NY mightn’t have been the right place to choose for a holiday! Any advice about the Chelsea would be much appreciated (a specific room to request etc).

New York is one of those special places, it’s been described to me so many times as ‘like being in a movie’. As a photographer my idea of New York is heavily influenced by the photographs of Weegee, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand – a lively, bustling, cosmopolitan city. As it’s my first trip to the city there’s a list of things that I want to do – visit the Whitney, MOMA and Guggenheim, drink a double whisky at the White Horse Tavern, people watch in the Village, brows the windows at Tiffany, eat a hotdog on the boardwalk at Coney Island, take the Staten Island Ferry, but when it comes to somewhere to stay, it has to be the Chelsea.

Trawling the list of people who have lived/stayed at the Chelsea gives me butterflies – and it’s not celebrity worship it’s an appreciation for music, literature, photography and film. We’ve been building our house now for over two years and the things we miss the most are the material things – our books, records and paintings. I imagine that staying at the Chelsea will make us somehow seem closer to those people who’s work fill our shelves and adorn our walls.

The second Welshman on my list is Dylan Thomas, he once said that his hometown, Swansea was the graveyard of ambition but he like Cale made his way to London and then to New York. Thomas unlike Cale was part of the small bohemian Welsh world, he was part of the Kardomah Gang (a group of poets who used to meet at the Kardomah Café in Swansea) and met his wife Caitlin whilst she was with the painter Augustus John. At the time Tenby a picturesque Georgian seaside town was the summer home of Welsh bohemia, it is now, though architecturally beautiful just a seaside town filled with tourists and drunks on stag weekends. New York has The Village an icon of bohemia in much the same way as Paris has Montmartre. We haven’t got anything like that here in Wales. I just want some experience of what might have been had I been born sixty years ago.
Cheers, Illtud.

Well, if you had been born 60 years earlier, things sure would have been a lot different. The place as a really hoppin’ flophouse in those days!  On the plus side, the fact that your coming to New York in February may get you a lower rate.  And, if you don’t mind a room with a shared bath, that may be the less expensive way to go. It never hurts to mention your love of the Chelsea to our illustrious proprietor Stanley Bard!
As for which room to ask for, you can’t go wrong with Sid’s room! (Just kidding, actually.  They’ll never let you in if you do that.)  Oh, and I think you’re supposed to have 18 whiskeys at the White Horse before you check into the Chelsea.