Living with Legends
Hotel Chelsea Blog
Category: Ed Hamilton’s Slice of Life
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A couple of weeks ago we took Dashiell, who writes the column “The New Guy” for Gawker, on a tour of the hotel. We showed him the Stairwell of Death and various interesting paintings, as he recounts in his column. Apparently he wasn’t too impressed with the décor, remarking…
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We heard them come in late last night; several people checked into the transient room next door and all had to go to the shared bathroom in the hallway, one after another. The next morning I met the last of them as he was clearing out, a thin man in his late thirties dressed in…
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On a rainy night last week, Susan and I were cutting through Washington Square Park on our way to a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. A soggy homeless man wrapped in a blanket shambled toward us across the lawn. “Excuse me people,” he said. “I want to tell you something that the CIA doesn’t…
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Susan and I were back in Louisville for a visit recently, and though we didn’t make it to the track, we did run into our old drinking buddy Brian, and he related this somewhat Bukowskian equestrian yarn: You know John Gordon? I was at Churchill downs for his dad’s birthday…
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An old Chelsea babysitter writes: Though I never lived at the Chelsea Hotel myself, I used to babysit for a young couple who lived there back in the early nineties. They were not artists. The man was an engineer and the woman owned a small business and I’m not sure why…
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Today we kick off our blog-of-horror week. Everyday, leading up to Halloween, we will be running ghost stories set in our favorite spooky, old hotel. So don’t miss a single scare! It’s well known that underground filmmaker Harry Smith was also a painter, folklorist and ethnomusicologist, and that he collected string…
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A middle-aged woman and her two teenage daughters had checked into the room next door to us at the Chelsea Hotel. The woman, blond, Midwestern, overweight, was cheerful and seemed open minded—good qualities to have around this place. Speaking to her in the hallway outside her room, I had to draw her out a little…
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I was at the gym across the street from the Chelsea, the New York Sports Club. The locker room was almost empty, which was odd, but I suppose that’s because it was early on a Sunday morning. A fit and trim, rather bulked-up young man strolled past me into the shower room, half yelling, half…
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I. Old Lady on a Walker A decrepit, bent-over old lady in a green dress and a pillbox hat was trying to make it across 7th Avenue at 23rd street. Of course she moved very slowly and the light changed before she could get all the way across, and so she was…
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There was a clean cut, middle-aged man in a polo shirt and neatly pressed khakis sitting in the Chelsea lobby one evening. He looked like a Frenchman—though maybe that had something to do with the bottle of wine he was swigging from. An old rocker in a tee-shirt and…
Living with Legends 