Living with Legends
Hotel Chelsea Blog
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Category: Dead Authors
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As many of you already know, poet Edgar Lee Masters, was a former Chelsea Hotel resident. His 1915 book, The Spoon River Anthology, is the story of the fictional town of Spoon River, and in it, the town’s residents are now dead and returning to tell their secrets and stories. The Green-Wood Historic Fund in…
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Here’s what remains of Beat writer Herbert Huncke’s room. Huncke, who inspired characters in Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s On the Road, and Burrough’s Junky, lived a hand-to-mouth existence in this rent stabilized room until his death. He could have never afforded to live in NYC if the Chetrits of the world had had their way. Underpaid,…
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Piri Thomas, born John Peter Thomas in New York City's Harlem Hospital in1928, grew up poor in Spanish Harlem and wrote the now classic best-selling autobiography “Down these Mean Streets” about his childhood there. Among his other works are: "Savior, Savior Hold My Hand", "Seven Long Times" and "Stories from El Barrio". A true artist…
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Lost our lease! Everything must go! Stanley was famous for renting the room where Madonna shot her Sex book to Material Girl-worshiping hipsters with stars in their eyes. Lately, however, sex alone has not been paying the bills. In response, general manager Arnold Tamasar has revealed a new marketing strategy: Celebrity Death Tourism. (And maybe…
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Thanks to Laki Vazakas for the Holiday reminder.
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From the comment section of Rolling Stone, by commentor Dennis Spencer. "In 1978 I lived at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. One afternoon I heard a knock on my door. When I opened it there stood a tall, drugged- out looking, skinny guy about my age with stringy red hair. With him were…
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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…
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We are sad to learn of the passing of former Chelsea Hotel resident Arthur C. Clarke. Despite being ill at the time, Clarke graciously sent an e-mail to support the Bards back in June. NPR and The New York Times have great coverage today. (Thanks to Judith & Mary Anne for the tip.)Other appreciations of…
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The Chelsea Hotel of BD times is but a pale shadow of its former glory. No cats in the halls?! We’ve long heard rumors of an eccentric lady who kept a tiger in her apartment at the Chelsea way back in the 60s, but we tended to dismiss them as just too wild even for…
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Poet Dylan Thomas’ house in Wales has been beseiged by raving real estate vultures hell-bent on laying waste to the historic structure in a psychotic frenzy of greed that can be satisfied only when they have squeezed every last farthing from the rubble strown lot upon which not one single-celled organism is suffered to draw…
Living with Legends 