We get lots of film crews at the Chelsea, shooting videos, TV episodes, and even big-budget Hollywood movies.  They pull up in their trailers, blocking the street so you can’t get across it, and they set up tables on the sidewalk and pile junk in front of the door, so even entering the hotel becomes…

A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE             Hiroya, the crazy Japanese painter, was hanging out in the lobby as usual, annoying tourists.  I said Hi to him as I came in the door and walked by him to the elevator.  The elevator was already there, so I got right on, but before the…

       There’s a tiny old barbershop around the corner from the Chelsea.  It must have been there for fifty years, and it doesn’t look like it’s changed much in that time either. The old brown barber chairs are patched with cloth tape, and the linoleum is worn through where the barbers circle the…

THE SWORDSMAN             I remember my first night in the Chelsea.  My girlfriend and I had just spent hours moving in all our stuff—more than the guys at the desk had ever seen, they said.  I was excited and a bit nervous to be in New York.  Though I was dead tired,…

                                                            Knoxville       Slightly hung over, I was going out to the deli one morning to get coffee and muffins.  The elevator was packed with fat Midwestern tourists, and with one tall, thin Japanese hipster…

Sarah is an older lady, scatterbrained, though endearingly so, with a wild mane of curly gray hair.  A jewelry designer, she’s lived here in the Chelsea since the sixties, provided gems for the Warhol superstars.         Sarah’s large apartment/workshop is filled floor to ceiling with a lifetime’s accumulation of dusty junk: tools, boxes of…

THE BAD COFFEE My girlfriend likes her coffee with cream, no sugar.  So that’s what I tell them in the deli every morning when I go to get the muffins and coffee.  But you have to watch these guys, because if you turn your back on them for a moment they’ll shovel about six spoonfuls…

Stanley Bard says that getting into the Chelsea is harder than getting into an Ivy League college.  He says he does extensive research on each potential resident.  And while I’ve no doubt that this is true, it sometimes happens, even at the best of schools, that the Registrar loses your transcript. A man in his…

            Hiroya was a fat Japanese man, friendly, gregarious, with long, wild, black hair, that hung in a tangle in his face.  He was an artist, and used to show his graffiti-based paintings in the hall.             Hiroya shared a bathroom with us on the third floor.  Every day…

The Chelsea is a mix of permanent residents and transients—who could be tourists or businessmen, or prostitutes or junkies.  For the past few years we’d been lucky, and the room next door to us was rented by a dancer—exotic or otherwise, she never did say—who kept weird hours but was reasonably quiet.  But then she…