Historian Sherill Tippins, whose history of the Chelsea, "The Dream Palace" is due out soon, wrote in to remind us that history reapeats itself:
Thomas Wolfe wrote this at the Chelsea Hotel. It’s remarkably appropriate this week:
"On October 24 [1929], in New York, in a marble-fronted building down in Wall Street, there was a sudden crash that was heard throughout the land. The dead and outworn husk of the America that had been had cracked and split right down the back, and the living, changing, suffering thing within–the real America…began now slowly to emerge. It came forth into the light of day, stunned, cramped, crippled by the bonds of its imprisonment, and for a long time it remained in a state of suspended animation, full of latent vitality, waiting, waiting patiently, for the next stage of its metamorphosis.
"The leaders of the nation had fixed their gaze so long upon the illusions of a false prosperity that they had forgotten what America looked like. Now they saw it–saw its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength–and turned their shuddering eyes away. ‘Give us back our well-worn husk,’ they said, ‘where we were so snug and comfortable.’ And then they tried word-magic. ‘Conditions are fundamentally sound,’ they said–by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed…
"But they were wrong. They did not know that you can’t go home again. America had come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else"
–Thomas Wolfe
"You Can’t Go Home Again"
Living with Legends 
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