Any lit blogger worth his or her salt should be able to come up with a fictional character that resides at the Chelsea.  This proved to be more difficult than I thought.  I wanted to identify a character from a big literary work and submit it to Randy Cohen for his mapping Manhattan project.  After…

Carrie Bedsore’s worldwide tour has brought her to the Chelsea. Check the Fickle Finger of Fate blog for a list of performance venues.

Courtesy of the New York City Public Library’s digital collection of more than 5,000 restaurant menus from 1851 – 1910 I now know that the following menu was offered to the Pratt Institute Graduates Association in the Hotel’s grand dining room, which is now El Quixote, on March 8, 1900. Oysters, Puree of Peas, Olives,…

One of the CBC’s best-known radio broadcasters is leading a campaign to have Leonard Cohen receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Not that I don’t want to see a former resident receive such a great honor, but Leonard Cohen would not have been the first person to come to mind. Read the article to…

From Jane Fonda:  My Life So Far …I was Henry Fonda’s privileged daughter, who appeared to be thumbing my nose at the country that had provied me with those privileges.  More than that, I am a woman, which made my sitting there even more of a betrayal:  Barbarella become their enemy. I had spent the…

My favorite restaurant, Florent, maintains a similar spirit to the Hotel Chelsea.  This week, The New York Times restaurant critic reviewed Florent. Here are a few tips that he didn’t learn from his visit.  If you get lucky, you could end up participating in the “Guess which celebrity I waited on last week?” quiz.  But…

Randy Cohen is proposing to create a literary map of the homes of the characters in New York based novels.   Since I only know about a particular haunt of a few authors I’m not going to be very helpful.  Read We’ll Map Manhattan and share your knowledge.

Grumpy Old Bookman doubts that this blog is a labor of love created by a part-time amateur.  He is giving the Hotel Chelsea management team way too much credit.  No one has ever accused the hotel’s managers of doing anything in a professional manner.  If this was a corporate blog there would be absolutely no…

Run right out and see The Interpreter.  I haven’t seen it, but during the filming two years ago Sean Penn was around the hotel quite a bit.  It was after he had won an Oscar for Mystic River.  One day my neighbor and I were exiting the elevator and he was getting on.  My neighbor,…

A Portraitist Whose Canvas Is a Piano reports on a muscial composition that Phillip Glass has written as a portrait of the painter Chuck Close.  The piece belongs to the tradition of musical portraits that Virgil Thomson wrote of his friends in his Chelsea Hotel apartment.