Living with Legends

Dish & Spoone visit our block and find a Warhol Superstar ready to recommend a neighborhood eatery.

That afternoon we were loitering near the Chelsea Hotel, reminiscing about our nights at Warhol’s Factory, when a former superstar, looking much the worse for wear, emerged from the lobby. After exchanging air-kisses, we asked her the buzz on lunch in the neighborhood. She cadged a cigarette and whispered, "El Cocotero. Get the arepas." El Cocotero´s cool blue walls, terracotta floors and potted palms created an oasis of elegant calm. Luis, the gregarious owner, related tales of his childhood in Venezuela and plied us with samples of a tangy molasses-flavored limeade.

Arepas, which look like small round sandwiches, are thick corn-flour cakes stuffed with every conceivable filling. El Cocotero grinds its own corn flour and offers arepas in artful combinations. Luis recommended one with chicken, avocado, and cilantro, and one with roasted pork and green pepper mojo sauce.

The simple ingredients, so deftly prepared, absolutely shone. We loved the aquacate salad, in which creamily ripe avocado, tomatoes and field greens were dressed with a dazzlingly zesty lime vinaigrette. Bill: $19.25.
El Cocotero
228 West 18th Street

Now that this blog has more than three readers, we need a columnist to respond to reader’s questions.  Are any of you folks who are sitting around in the lobby using the free wifi interested in the gig?  I didn’t think so, but if you change your mind, let me know.

How do the apartments work at the Chelsea? do I walk in and ask the front desk if there are apartments available for rent? Or is there a management company? Despite the elevator full of tourists and screechy celebrity-chasers, it sounds like a fun place to live. Cheers, Evan

Stanley, this one’s for you:  "At the Chelsea Hotel, renting is equivalent to a tenured position at an Ivy League college, a kind of golden (spangled?) handcuff.  Stanley Bard, the managing director since the 1960’s of this 19th-century grande dame handpicks his tenants like a club impresario at the velvet rope.  "I want them to be here," he said, "I want them to stay forever."

"There is no waiting list, he said, "but we go through great expense and detail to decide whether someone would be good for the hotel." (Source: NYTimes, June 2005)

So, Evan, bring examples of your art, your transcripts, lots of cash and let us know what happens.

Business Week’s professional blogger, Stephen Baker, admits to wasting time reading Living with Legends.

So I start with a blog about New York’s Chelsea Hotel. I read about Leonard Cohen’s love affair with Janis Joplin, a funny piece about a guy having a run-in with the janitor over a spilled cup of coffee.
Long story short: a half hour later, I’m still here, presumably working, reading the first blog on the list. This is not time effective.

Another time waster indeed, think of all the time I waste keeping the blog updated!

Finally, the news that we’ve all been waiting for, Black is the new Black, when it isn’t gray, blueish or brownish.

Black is the basis for two important looks, according to Sally Singer, Vogue’s fashion news director and Chelsea Hotel Resident. "The interesting thing about black this season is that it’s either used as a pop art basic against white, a ’60s look that shows the graphic nature of black and white. (Christian) Dior did it well. … Or, you see a mixing of textures and tones of black. Black velvet, black gauze, black silk or viscose. … There’s varying amounts of light that goes through it to make the black sometimes look gray, blueish or brownish," she says.

Chuck Klosterman, author of Killing Yourself to Live, avoids answering a tough question.

AW: During your trip, the manager of the Chelsea Hotel said people who come to see Sid Vicious’s room are looking for nothing. Why does anyone care about rock stars if they don’t have any meaning?
CK: That’s a much larger question: Why do people care about celebrity? In the short term, it’s a very easy answer; in the long term, it’s almost impossible. We all know we’re going to die, but we can’t think of that all the time. So, therefore, any time a celebrity dies, that knowledge of our own mortality becomes manifested in their death.

Where does Ryan Adams rate among the greatest rock breakdowns of all times?  Fans attending his recent shows have reported that Adams has been heckling his audience and bitching about the sound system.  Former resident Ryan has cancelled several upcoming shows.  The article points out, Ryan has a ways to go before he can even come close to the onstage antics of country boozer crooners Charlie Rich and George Jones.

"If you couldn’t get into the Chelsea Hotel, you came here (Gramercy Park Hotel)," so said British filmmaker, Simon Monjack, in a Jan 23, 2005 interview in the NYT.  Is that what happened to Ian Schrager?  He couldn’t buy the Chelsea so he bought the Gramercy Park.  In a recent interview with the London Financial Times, Schrager revealed that the Chelsea is on his radar:

AB: How concerned are you about preserving the legacy of the original Gramercy Park Hotel?
IS:   It’s one of those three sister hotels in New York that everyone thinks they own a piece of – the Plaza, the Chelsea and the Gramercy Park.  It will still have the same DNA but we didn’t want to look back in the past; we wanted to look forward.  When we took it over it was a dump. (6/25/05 LFT)

Now that the work is almost finished at the Gramercy, has Ian regrouped in an effort to purchase the Last Outpost of Bohemia?  Over my dead body, Stanly Bard replies, in The New York Post. "Someday when I’m gone, they [the investors] can sell it," he told The Post.

Filming in the neighborhood has started for Lasse Hallstrom’s upcoming biopic "Hoax," a drama about Clifford Irving, the former Hotel Chelsea resident who wrote and sold a bogus biography of Howard Hughes to McGraw-Hill for a considerable advance.  Richard Gere stars along with Julie Delpy.  Friday night, scenes were filmed inside of the Capitol Fishing & Tackle shop located next door to the Chelsea. 

"…The Chelsea was my hideout and hideaway at a time when I went involuntarily public and needed a secure nest, friends, buffers.  Stanley and staff understood.  My wife and I were broke, too.  Stanley arranged an auction of my wife’s paintings in the lobby; Cliff Gorman, the comic, was the auctioneer.  We must have sold a few canvases and there was a fine party afterward.  The tribe came through.
When I got out of prison in 1974 I stayed there again.  My sensuality had been stifled for sixteen months.  I felt cold, out of it.  Chelsea girls lit another fire."   Clifford Irving, p 111, Chelsea Photographs by Claudio Edinger.

I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that we’ll see Lasse and crew inside of the Chelsea in the near future. (Irving and his wife Edith in photo)