Living with Legends

Hotel Chelsea Blog

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  • One of the five readers of this blog has a question

    How can you confirm that someone actually lived in the Chelsea? 
    Collected oral histories and archival sources are a good starting point.  You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II is both a fascinating book to read and a well documented resource.

    You Must Remember This is part of Amazon’s “Search inside the book” program, which results in the ability to find interesting details about authors Edgar Lee Masters and Thomas Wolfe. 

    on Page 462:

    "… Only at the Hotel Chelsea did it seem that life continued as it had. The proper ladies enjoyed their afternoon teas, while the literary …"

  • Bad Writing

    Everybody is a critic. Passages from Ethan Hawke’s two novels were featured during a recent literary series highlighting bad writing. Maybe they all have a point.

  • On the Nod

    Coming back from the deli, a bag of muffins in one hand and a tray of coffees in the other, I rounded the corner to the elevator just as it was opening. There was a man in a black leather jacket in the back corner of the elevator, head down, slumping forward, on the nod.  Without thinking, I stepped into the elevator, and as soon as I was fully on, he fell right into me.  “Shit!” he yelled, loudly.  Luckily, he caught himself just as he hit me; I couldn’t have caught him because my arms were full.  “Oh, sorry,” he mumbled.

    The desk clerk had seen what had happened and he called out, “Hey, what’s going on in there?!  Everything all right in there?!”

    “Yeah, it’s OK,” I said.  I hit the button for my floor and up we went.  The guy in the leather jacket had apparently slept through his floor the first time he went up, and had ridden back down to the lobby.  Now he remembered what he was doing and hit his button: 4.

    “Sorry, man,” he apologized again, seeing the coffee slopped out on my jacket.  “I just forgot what I was doing.  I’m really forgetful sometimes.  I just woke up and I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

    “Yeah, I hear ya,” I said.  “I know what you mean.”

    “It was one of those senior moments,” he said, laughing.  He was probably in his mid-thirties.  “It could happen to anybody,” he said as he got off.

    Yeah, anybody who shoots heroin.
    Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton

  • Mapping the Chelsea

    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 spending an afternoon searching through Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, which I thought would be my best bet, I consulted a person who knows more about the Chelsea than anybody – a high placed knowledgeable individual (HPKI). 

    After I explained the project to HPKI he exclaimed, "In Ethan Hawke’s "Chelsea Walls" all of the characters live in the Chelsea."  I didn’t like that suggestion.  After I saw the movie, I wanted to move out of the Chelsea.  The movie is very loosely based on Dylan Thomas play "Under Milkwood."  The characters in "Under Milkwood" do not reside in the Chelsea. 

    We need a big literary work to get the hotel on the map, I explained.  "Well, what about Sparkle Hayter’s book The Chelsea Girl Murders. The female detective lives in the Hotel."  At least that’s a better suggestion than Chelsea Walls.  However, that was my obvious fallback plan.  Finally, after giving it a bit of thought, HPKI said "In Saul Bellow’s Herzog the main character’s father-in-law lives in the Chelsea."  That gave me something to work with at least.

    I went and bought a copy of Herzog and spent several evenings scouring the book. Here is what I found.  A description of Madeline’s apartment.  "…The fixtures were old-fashion in this place. These had been luxury apartments in the 1890s… The tiles were a faded cherry color, and the toothbrush rack, the fixtures, were ornate, old nickel."

    I went back to HPKI and explained that I didn’t find squat about the Chelsea in Herzog  beyond the previously mentioned reference to an old, elegant apartment building.  "That’s it," the HPKI screamed, "Madeline, Herzog’s lover, lived in the Chelsea."

    Blogger Rodney Welch has considered the same question and taken a different approach to the answer.  He suggests "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowland,"  a character in a song written by Bob Dylan while he was living at the Chelsea.  I don’t think Sad Eyed Lady qualifies since she is clearly based on Dylan’s wife Sara.   Two other songs written by Dylan, "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat" and "Just Like A Woman," were reputedly inspired by Chelsea resident Edie Sedgwick.

  • Unless something newsworthy happens I’m not going to post over the weekend.  I have to catch up on my reading.  I have two non-Chelsea related titles at the top my list.  First up is Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters, which has received acclaim in Great Britain.  I visited several independent bookstores in Manhattan trying to locate a copy, but was ultimately forced to order a copy online.  My second pick is Yongsoo Park’s Las Cucarachas, a portrait of a young boy growing up in a NYC housing project in the 1980s.

  • Everybody Is an Authority

    The Chicago Tribune sheds light on the death of Dylan Thomas courtesy of a waiter at the White Horse Tavern. 
    "No one, for example, seems to know exactly what happened to Dylan Thomas on that July night in 1953 when the poet stepped out of the White Horse Tavern at Hudson Ave. and 11th Street and dropped dead.
    Some accounts say Thomas downed 18 or 19 whiskeys at the bar and declared, "I believe that’s the record" just before he succumbed.
    Others claim he died of undiagnosed diabetes.
    "He didn’t die here; he died in his room at the Chelsea Hotel," a young White Horse Tavern server says.  She spoke with absolute certainty."

    Most biographies that I have read indicate that Thomas died at St. Vincent’s hospital after consuming all of that whiskey and falling into a diabetic coma.

    If you are in NYC you can catch the one man show "Do Not Go Gentle."

  • Cowboy Doc

    We used to have a doctor in the Chelsea.  I needed a flu shot one fall, and, since I had seen his fliers in the elevator, I went to his office, on the first floor.  It was eleven in the morning.  It took him a long time to answer the door, and when he did, a cloud of pungent, exotic smoke wafted from the room.  The doctor wore army pants and a t-shirt, and spoke in a southern drawl.  Classic rock was playing on his stereo.  Though his office hours began at nine, he said he had just got out of bed.

    I believe I must have been one of his first patients, and he showed me around the office proudly.  He had remodeled the place to look like an old-time doctor’s office, complete with antique equipment, like apothecary cabinets and examining tables from the fifties, all very cool. (There’s a particular Chelsea aesthetic that many residents seem to share: grandly trashy, worn chic, whatever you want to call it, and he had that down.)  I was impressed.

                I told him I was a writer and he said he’d written a novel: a sort of combination of star wars and the occult, and I lied and said I’d like to read it.  I got the flu shot, and he called me back several times afterwards to make sure I hadn’t had a bad reaction.

    Soon after that, somebody took to defacing the fliers he had put up in the elevators, writing “Cowboy Doc” all over them, among other things.  I thought that sucked.  (There’s a dark side to the Chelsea: wherever you have a lot of creative people, there are bound to be some who are bitter about their careers not quite panning out.)  The flu shot worked, however: I didn’t get sick all winter.

    I kept meaning to go back and visit him, but I never go to the doctor unless I absolutely have to, and so it wasn’t until the next fall that I ventured back to his office.  He wasn’t there, but the door of his office was open and movers were carrying out all of his antique doctor’s equipment.  He just never got enough business.  Though to my mind he fit right in, probably for a lot of people he didn’t really inspire confidence as a doctor.

    I remember our conversation the day I got the flu shot.  He said he had been trained as an all-purpose doctor by the army, and he gave me a long list of specialties in which he had attained competence.  The one I remember was “Emergency Psychiatric Intervention,” and I told him that sounded like it should go over pretty well at the Chelsea.
    Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton

  • His writing is childlike, surprising on occasion

    In a recent review, Robin Schroffel of the Edmonton Sun calls Legend of a Rock Star: The Last Testament of Dee Dee Ramone, "heart-wrenching."

  • Carrie Bedsore always stays at the Chelsea

    Carrie Bedsore’s worldwide tour has brought her to the Chelsea. Check the Fickle Finger of Fate blog for a list of performance venues.
    Delores02

  • Eating Well

    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, Baked Codfish, Chicken Croquette, Lima Beans, Roast Lamb, Mashed Potato and Mint Jelly.
    Chelseamenu