Great pictures from Friday nights opening party courtesy of Linda Troeller.
Colleen, Arthur’s wife, and friend.
Arthur and friend.
Arthur and April of Suite 303
Chelsea boys enjoy the show.
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Vogue editor
Sally Singer’s oldest son Malachy doesn’t seem too thrilled to be attending the Marc Jacobs show. But at least he got to get out. If I were in his younger brothers Oscar or Pascal’s shoes I’d be throwing a temper tantrum. Perhaps this explains the howls that rocked the Chelsea the other night. Hopefully Malachy brought them home a goody bag.
Via Gawker’s ongoing coverage of fashion week. -
Friday, Feb. 10, 8:00 – 12:00 p.m.
Opening reception for Hotel Chelsea resident Arthur Weinstein’s photos and silkscreens is today. You can find examples of his work on the 10th floor of the Chelsea. (Photo:Lorenzo’s photo group)
100 Lafayette Street, NY NY -
NYC alt band Elefant dropped by the Hotel Chelsea to shoot their forthcoming video "Elefant." Further footage is scheduled to be filmed at the band’s February 17 concert in Boston. -
Author F. Paul Wilson has been generous enough to send us an excerpt from HOSTS, which features the Chelsea Hotel and El Quijote in a couple of scenes. HOSTS
features a recurring character known as Repairman Jack — a name given him because he will, for a price, fix situations that can’t be remedied through official channels — blackmail, for instance. He lives under the radar with no Social Security number and no official identity — a ghost in the modern machine. The woman he meets in the Chelsea lobby turns out to be the older sister he hasn’t seen in 15 years. She wasn’t a lesbian when he left her, but she is now.
What you do? I’m a writer — novels (thrillers in all sorts of genres) and short stories. 2006 marks the 35th anniversary of my first publication.Do you live in the Chelsea neighborhood? No, but I went to high school here. I was a Joisey kid who commuted daily to a Jesuit military school — Xavier on West 16th. The military part was mandatory then and we were known citywide as Subway Commandos. I came of age in Chelsea — I learned where to get fireworks in Chinatown, how to get a mug of porter in McSorley’s (men-only then), all sorts of cool stuff. I fell in love with New York then and have continued the affair ever since. The city is very much a continuing character in the Repairman Jack novels.
What inspired you to set a scene in El Quijote? I’ve eaten there quite a few of times. I love their shrimp in green garlic sauce — you can’t close-talk to anyone for the next six months, but it’s worth it.
Do you think that there is a creative energy in the Chelsea Hotel? No. I don’t believe in any of that stuff. Creativity isn’t some sort of astral goo you can leave behind. This is a bring-your-own world. But if you have a few creative bones in you, the idea of staying in the same place — maybe the same room — as so many icons of whatever field your working in might spark you to greater achievement. I mean, come on — Gregory Corso lived here!
What’s your favorite Hotel Chelsea story? Well, being into crime and mayhem — evidenced b
y the subject matter of my fiction — the Sid and Nancy story sticks out. But my love of the place goes back to my high school days when I used to wander the city looking for cool buildings. I started making a list back then (still have it) and the Chelsea was near the top. Still is. I simply love the look of it.What’s your favorite El Quijote story? Don’t have one…besides the food.
An excerpt from HOSTS: A Repairman Jack Novel © 2001 by F. Paul Wilson
Somewhere in Chapter 5 . . .
Not going to happen, Jack told himself as he headed down the stairs for the street.
He’d do whatever it took to keep this one lousy incident from disrupting his life and his business.
His business . . . he hadn’t checked his voice mail in a while.
Walked over to Broadway, found a phone booth, and tapped in his codes. One call. From a woman who said she’d been referred to him as someone who could help her with a problem involving a friend and a cult. Left her cell phone number but didn’t say who’d referred her or any details about the cult or her problem with it. Decided she was worth a call back. An indefinable something about her voice appealed to him, made him want to work on her problem.
Glanced at his watch: 11:20. Might be late to call her, but he needed something to do and this could be it. A new customer with a new fix-it job would occupy his mind and time while waiting for the fallout from tonight’s fiasco.
Dialed her number. When she answered he said. “This is Jack, returning your call.”
“Oh. I didn’t expect you to call back so soon.” A nice voice; soft and mature. Not too old, not too young.
We’re off to a good start, Jack thought.
“Some problems can wait,” he said, “some can’t. You didn’t say anything about yours. I can meet you tonight if necessary.”
“Gosh, it’s late but . . .”
“Where do you live?”
“I . . . I’d rather not say.”
“Not your street address, your section of the city.”
“Oh. It’s called the Flower District. It’s—”
“Know it.” Upper Twenties around Sixth, above Chelsea. “I can meet you anywhere you want down there in about fifteen minutes.”
“Tonight? Gee, I don’t . . .”
“Lady, you called me.”
A pause during which he swore he could hear her chewing her lip.
“Okay. But someplace public.”Someplace public . . . could meet her on Forty-second Street. Few places in the city more public than the Deuce since Disney moved in. Maybe too public. Better to make it closer to where she lived . . .
Considered the Seventh Avenue Papaya on the corner of Twenty-third, but that was usually a madhouse this time of night. He grinned. Maybe he should freak her out and suggest La Maison de Sade, the S-and-M supper club next to the Chelsea Hotel. Wait—that was it.
“How about the Chelsea Hotel?”
“Where’s that?”
Something not right here. “Thought you said you lived in the Flower District. You live down there and don’t know the Chelsea?”
“I’m visiting. I’m from . . . from out of town.”
“Okay then. It’s right down Seventh from you. On Twenty-third. I’ll meet you in the lobby. Is that public enough?”
“I don’t know . . . this is so strange.” -
A great profile of former Hotel Chelsea Resident and painter Herbert Gentry (1919 – 2003) iappears in this week’s issue of the
Hartford Courant. Mr. Gentry lived in Paris for many years, as well as at the Hotel Chelsea. The profile focuses mainly on Mr. Gentry’s year’s in Paris."If Gentry’s art, which was far-better known in Europe than in his native land, is a revelation to
Americans, his equally surprising, colorful, cosmopolitan life has the makings of a Hollywood bio-pic.Gentry was quite literally born into the world of art and entertainment, according to his widow, Mary Anne Rose.
His mother, Theresa, was a smart, gorgeous, gregarious showgirl, Rose says. A well-known Ziegfeld Follies chorine, she danced at the glitziest theaters on Broadway and had plenty of friends in the art and showbiz worlds. One of her close buddies and fellow dancers was Josephine Baker, who was later to become the toast of pre-war Paris when African American entertainers were the pop rage of all France.
Because of his mother’s semi-celebrity status as a stylish hoofer, he grew up in Harlem’s Sugar Hill in a home frequented by dancers, musicians, composers, writers and artists. Duke Ellington and the famous white orchestra leader Paul Whiteman visited the Gentry home, where the buzz among globetrotting entertainers was often about Paris as a magical city of light and enlightenment.
Going regularly to the theater with his beautiful, popular mother, Gentry got a vivid backstage view of the entertainment business. His loving, attentive mother made sure young Gentry took piano lessons to insure that her son was cultured. And the Big Apple’s then robust jazz scene of the 1930s and 1940s nourished his burgeoning love for jazz.
Drafted in 1942, he served in the Army, a life-changing, eye-opening experience that took him to Corsica, Algeria, Marseilles, Morocco, Strasburg, Salzburg and, most important, to Paris.
Discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and, pushed by family pressures, resumed his business administration studies at New York University, which had been interrupted by the war. All the while, he longed to return to Paris, then an exciting center of post-war intellectual and artistic ferment, an almost mythical symbol of self-liberation and the bohemian life.
Thanks to the GI Bill, Gentry could afford to make the giant existential leap from boring accounting classes at New York University to the stimulating cabaret scene and academic life in Paris where he studied at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1946 to 1949.
Gentry went to Paris not just to escape the racism that was then endemic in America, Rose says, but because Paris had always had a magical, romantic hold on his mind since childhood. Besides, Paris was the home of modernism and artistic freedom, even an escape from his bourgeois relatives who wanted him to go into business, not throw his life away on anything as frivolous as art.
“All his mother’s dancer friends had gone to Paris, but she stayed home to take care of Herb. His dream had always been to go to Paris,” Rose says.
While in Paris, Gentry and the first of his three wives, the singer and painter Honey Johnson,
established a bustling cabaret in Montparnasse, which was an art gallery and salon by day and a popular jazz club and saloon by night.Chez Honey, as the Left Bank nightclub was called, became a gathering place for intellectuals, painters and musicians of every color and nationality. The club’s principle rule was that racism would never be tolerated in this polyglot, multiracial melting pot of a cabaret. Gentry’s only other rule was that “you had to be hip and sensitive.”
Among Chez Honey’s celebrated clientele were France’s intellectual power couple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Other luminaries at the swinging salon included such famous expatriate African American writers as James Baldwin and Richard Wright; such painters as Romare Bearden (one of Gentry’s closest friends), Beauford Delaney and the jazz-obsessed Larry Rivers; and such entertainers as Eartha Kitt, Orson Welles and Marcel Marceau. The club’s nightly jam sessions also drew a legion of jazz greats including Ellington; Lena Horne; Louis Armstrong; Sidney Bechet; Dizzy Gillespie; Benny Goodman; the saxophonists Don Byas, James Moody and Zoot Sims; drummer Kenny Clarke; and pianist John Lewis.
A charming, eminently likable bon vivant, Gentry was pal and gracious host to virtually all the cultural celebrities who were then making Paris an alluring, international cultural beacon, Rose recalls.
“Herb said he only missed out on Picasso, and that modern jazz in Europe began in his club,” she adds."
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There’s been scaffolding up around the Chelsea for several months now, seriously detracting from the building’s unique gothic splendor. The workers put it up in the early summer, went away for the rest of the summer—it was probably too hot to work–then came back and worked for about two weeks in October. They haven’t done anything since then, although the scaffolding remains up. When
the workers were here they stood on a hanging scaffolding outside my window and yelled back and forth to one another for eight hours a day, when they weren’t scraping or sanding with a machine. (Photo: Shows the scaffolding on the building in August)There were two workers outside my window (though there were others elsewhere on the building), a New Jersey Guy and a Russian. They hadn’t met each other before this job, and so the first day they bonded. “My last rap was a misdemeanor, but they kept me in six months,” the Jersey guy said.
“My last was a felony,” the Russian said, as if it were no big deal. “And they only gave me three.”
It was comforting to know that if anything went missing, I would at least have someone to blame.
The two workers had to strip and paint the woodwork, and to paint the windowsills—both of which chores made perfect sense. But they also had to strip the tar off the gutter—gouging and chipping away at it with their putty knives and then buffing it with a circular sander to reveal the gleaming copper–and then to refinish it, which made no sense at all since it had just been refinished earlier that year. The point, apparently, was to change the color from black to gray, maybe to match the paint. The jersey guy, who was the most talkative, shared my confusion: “Why the hell are we doing this? Why are we making it gray? It’ll be black again in a month anyway!”
I couldn’t do much work with these guys yelling back and forth all day, so I had to resort to transcribing their conversation to kill time. About ninety percent of what they said was bullshit—the Jersey guy had a lot to say about sports and drinking—but once in awhile they got onto an interesting topic. At around this time terrorists had just bombed the subway in London, and the cops had started searching people in the subway here:
“They said on TV, if you see somebody who looks suspicious in the subway, let us know,” the Russian said, chuckling.
“Fuck, everybody looks suspicious in the subway,” the Jersey guy said.
“They’re not going to stop it, nothing can stop it.”
“Hell no!” the Jersey guy said. “If I’m a cop and I see some Arab guy with a backpack, I’m not gonna say, open that up. What am I, a fucking idiot? He’ll blow us both up. Just keep going buddy, blow some other place up. I wanna get home to my wife and my kids.”
“I’ll search some old lady, instead,” the Russian said.
“So the Arab blows some people up, and your boss comes up and says, ‘Hey, why didn’t you stop that guy?’ ‘Oh sorry chief, I must’ve missed him.’ What are they gonna do, fire the guy? Better than being dead. ‘Sorry chief, I’ll do better next time.’”
On this one subject I feel like these guys may have had the proper mindset to provide us with
some insight. They were at least half right about the gutter, by the way: it’s not quite black yet, but it does look pretty goddamn scummy. The black sealant was better because it hid the dirt.(Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)
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Tuesday, Feb. 7, 10:30 p.m.
Susanne Bartsch and Kenny Kenny invite you to Heatherette Fashion Show After Party with Richie Rich and Traver Rains.
Happy Valley 14 East 27th St., NY NYWednesday, Feb. 8, 6:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m.
Welcome to the hottest night of the week. El Cuarto Rojo "The Red Room" is a weekly Latin party managed by the Chelsea’s own, Vic Stone. This week, DJ Checo provides a fresh, fierce latin mix of salsa, merengue, cumbia, reggaeton, bachata & more, with some old school funk and classics thrown in. Drink specials including coquitos and chichaitos. No jeans, caps, or sneakers. Free before 8:00. Women $5:00; Men $10:00. Weekly every Wednesday.
Serena in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel. 222 W. 23rd, NY NYThursday, Feb. 9, 9:00 p.m.
Jason Wu, a doll costumer, will introduce his first collection for real women
based on the sculptural styles of Charles James (Photos: Wu on your left, James on your right). A mere sixty-five dollars will get you one of Wu’s Barbie ensembles on E-bay.
Bryant Park, NY NYFriday, Feb. 10, 8:00 – 12:00 p.m.
Opening reception for Hotel Chelsea resident Arthur Weinstein’s photos and silkscreens is today. You can find examples of his work on the 10th floor of the Chelsea. (Photo:Lorenzo’s photo group)
100 Lafayette Street, NY NYSaturday, Feb. 11, 4:00 – 7:00 p.m.
I know a few Chelsea residents who are astrology buffs. Stop by the Marc Jacobs store on Bleeker Street and visit the favored astrologers of the fashion insiders, Stella Starksy and Quinn Cox. They will be providing free consultations in the store window this month.
Display window of Marc Jacobs, 403 Bleecker St., at W. 11th St. NY NYAnniversaries
Thursday, February 9
Brendan Behan’s Birthday. Get drunk and pass out in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel.
(Photo: Bluehour’s Flickr Group)
Friday, February 10
Anniversary of the death of Arthur Miller. I decided to move to the Chelsea in 1960 for the privacy I was promised. It seemed a wonderfully out-of-the-
way place, nearly a slum, where nobody would be likely to be looking for me. If you read Miller’s entire essay you’ll discover …"and a young woman with eyes so crazy that one remembered them as being above one another, would show up in the lobby now and then, distributing a ream of mimeographed curses on male people whom she accused of destroying her life and everything good, and threatening to shoot a man one of these days. I had a serious talk, or what I took to be one, with Mr Bard and his son Stanley who was gradually taking over, but they pooh-poohed the idea of her doing anything rash. As I slowly learned, they were simply not interested in bad news of any kind. Of course she shot Warhol two days later as he was entering the lobby from 23rd Street, aiming for his balls. But this only momentarily disturbed the even tenor of the Chelsea day, what with everything else going on."
Do not point out to Oprah that Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol while he was at The Factory. Oprah has been confused enough by the memoir form lately.
If you have a relevant Chelsea Hotel event that you would like featured in "All Tomorrow’s Parties," please e-mail the information to chelblog@yahoo.com -
Wondering how to properly celebrate the birth of William Burroughs? Shoot some heroin in the eighth floor bathroom at the Chelsea Hotel. Or if that’s too authentic for you, take a trip to the sanitized Beat
Hotel in Desert Hot Springs California. An upscale, commercialized version of the original Beat Hotel in Paris, the Beat Hotel is an intimate hotel with eight guest rooms and a pool and spa. And furnishings are actually from the "Beat" period. (See, an actual typewriter! Apparently you have to bring your own bongo drums.) Beginning this weekend the hotel kicks off the InterZone Beat Festival, an homage to the Beat Generation. Highlights of the event include Beat-related photographs and a performance by Grant Hart, Huskur Du founder and long-time friend of Burroughs. -
From a recent NYTimes profile of William Ivey Long. By the time Long graduated from Yale in 1975, he had been in college and graduate school for 10 years and had no idea how to look for a job. He
moved into the Chelsea Hotel to be near one of his idols, the couturier Charles James, who lived there and for whom Long worked, unpaid, until James died in 
1978. But he couldn’t find work in the theater and had what he calls ”breakdowns” for two years. ”When I came to New York, I was so scared that I would eat one banana and one yogurt a day, and I weighed 135 pounds,” he said. ”So I arrived with the least amount of energy you could possibly have. I can only imagine now that here was this scarecrow person, lacking the kick and drive and the clawing that I have shown is the center of my work ethic ever since. (Source: New York Times, Jan 29. 2006)Our resident fashionista Sally Singer declares that New York is back in fashion again. "I think it’s
another indication that the momentum of fashion and Fashion Week has moved back to New York," says Sally Singer, Vogue’s fashion news/features director. (Source: Newsday, Feb. 2, 2006)
Zaldy was one of the designers up for this year’s Fashion Group International’s Rising Star Award.
