Hotel Chelsea Blog
Good Afternoon.
I own the Knickerbocker, an apartment building in Albany and some one who wants to take photos of my building and tenants is compairing us to the Chelsea Hotel. Am I supposed to thank him for the compliment or punch him for being insulting?
Name Redacted
At last this blogging is starting to pay off! We arrived home the other day to find yet another suspicious package awaiting us at the front desk. (The last one was an origami unicorn laced in anthrax!) But we could see into this one so we weren’t too worried. It contained some delicious New Orleans coffee and 
Pralines, and beads freshly caught at this year’s Mardi Gras. The generous gifter writes:
I lived in Manhattan twenty years ago, and though I never stayed at the Chelsea, I was enamored of her history and mystique. It’s heartbreaking to think of her becoming just another bright, soulless box. We’re very much enjoying our stay – coming from New Orleans, we have a definite appreciation for the beauty of decay.
So thanks, kindred spirits from New Orleans, for the gifts, and more importantly for your support of the Chelsea. We know how you are having your own problems back home, and so it’s doubly kind of you to think of us. All of us around here will do our best to take care of the Hotel so it retains its charm for your next visit. — Ed Hamilton
Well, I guess we can’t count on Roger Waters to help save the Chelsea. According to a new book, Comfortably Numb
Yes!!!! The Chelsea still has it! It’s refreshing to be reminded that, despite renovations, gentrification, and the corporate takeover, the Chelsea still retains an almost supernatural power to scare the bejesus out of unsuspecting tourists. And this one’s from Ireland, too, which is not exactly famous for its luxury accommodations. Show me the worst flophouse in Vietnam, I dare you. The Chelsea will make it look like the Ritz.
Perceptive blog readers may notice that we’ve already received a report from the woman’s boyfriend:
There was a German couple staying next door to us in the transient room. One afternoon I ran into the man coming out of his room, and I said, “How are you enjoying your stay here at the Chelsea?”
“Oh, it was great until yesterday, when my wife packed up and went back to Germany without telling me.”
“Wow! That is a bummer,” I said. “Did she not like New York? I know it can be very fast-paced and intimidating.”
“She liked New York fine.”
“Then maybe it was the hotel. You know, there are some people who really hate it.”
“No, she loved the hotel,” the man said. “I think it was just me.”
Turns out her early departure may have had something to do with the accommodations after all.
The Chelsea Hotel of BD times is but a pale shadow of its former glory. No cats in the halls?! We’ve long heard rumors of an eccentric lady who kept a tiger in her apartment at the Chelsea way back in the 60s, but we tended to dismiss them as just too wild even for this primordial urban jungle. But now, at last, the truth comes to light. According to London’s Daily Telegraph, Theodora Keogh, granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt, and who died just recently at the ripe old age of 88, kept a margay, a South American “tiger cat” similar to an ocelot, while in residence at the Chelsea(1/29/08).
As you might imagine, Theodora led a colorful life, carrying a knife and swimming nude as a young girl, joining a ballet company early on, running with the Paris Review crowd in the City of Love, and writing nine novels with such scandalous themes as: incest between twins, young girls being lured to bed by diseased sculptors, passing history exams by threatening to expose teachers as lesbians, street musicians falling in love with child criminals, rape, unspeakable things, and being stirred to perform marital duties by “. . .memories of a dark, swarthy Indian boy walking in the Place Vendome.”
Theodora abandoned writing in 1962, and apparently moved to the Chelsea Hotel soon after. The affair with the margay, however, did not end well: one night, when Theodora passed out dead drunk in her room at the Chelsea—18 whiskeys, anyone?–the ravening beast gnawed off one of her ears!
We corresponded with Chelsea Hotel historian Sherrill Tippins about Theodora, and she was way ahead of us: she said that she had already contacted a biographer, who denied that the Tiger Lady had ever lived at the Chelsea Hotel, claiming instead that the margay incident had taken place in another building in the Chelsea neighborhood. But we here at the Chelsea know better: in addition to the confirmation of the old rumors, what other building in Manhattan would allow ferocious jungle cats to range freely through its halls?!
Theodora died on January 5 of this year in North Carolina, where, reportedly, she had had to give up raising chickens because they kept getting eaten by coyotes. (Yeah, I know, North Carolina doesn’t seem like a real big coyote state: no word on whether or not she was raising the coyotes herself.) — Ed Hamilton
A few weeks ago we received a suspicious package at the Chelsea. A large envelope with no 
return address, we opened it cautiously. Inside was a silver origami unicorn encased in a plastic box. “Undo me” the label demanded. No way, we said, figuring it was probably a stink bomb of some sort, at best, and at worst it was laced with anthrax. We tossed it in the trash.
A couple of days later we found out that it had been an invitation to Cindy Gallop’s futuristic theme party (L.A. in 2019) in her huge apartment across the street at the old Y. (She was nice enough to send us another invitation: it looked better before I unfolded it and then tried to fold it back.)
After this inauspicious beginning we breathed a sigh of relief, knowing things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Entering through the basement lobby, which has finally been renovated, we rode the elevator up to the black lacquer, art-and-taxidermy stuffed “Den of Cin” and ran into Cindy first thing. She wore a striking leather bustier, giving her the look of an atavistic post nuclear S&M High priestess. Perhaps she came up with the idea for the party so she could wear the stunning outfit, though it appealed to me as more Mad Max than Blade Runner. Or maybe something out of the pagan version of A Canticle for Lebowitz. Why walk, indeed!
Most people were about like us: oh this shirt or this dress looks kind of futuristic. (Like Rohit and 
Lizzie, the British couple who were staying in the Madonna “Sex” room, and with whom we walked across the street to the party.) One guy wore a plastic silver lame jacket we had seen the week before in American Apparel. A woman in a pink skirt simply put a tin-foil bow in her hair; her date wrapped foil around his wrist. Several women dressed up like the “replicant” played by Daryl Hanna in Blade runner—going to various lengths to replicate the look. Five men showed up in orange prison jump suits (go figure), while another, bafflingly, had attired himself as a cowboy. At least nobody showed up as Snow Fucking White or the Lion King (though that’s probably much closer to the future we will have to endure).
Due to racy accounts of past Cindy Gallop parties, we were looking forward to seeing the waiters 
prancing around with loins girded solely in Y towels. On this night, however, they were merely shirtless. (Though very buff: Debbie thinks they were running down to David Barton’s gym to do a few reps between carrying out plates of hors d’oevres.) This sets a bad precedent, certainly; who wants to live in a future where waiters are allowed to keep their pants on?
We partied as if an asteroid were on course to vaporize our planet by dawn. (Now there’s a future I could “live” with: why don’t the developers just nuke the whole city instead of agonizingly chopping us up knuckle by knuckle and joint by joint?)
Those of you who have been following Legends for a bit know that we met Cindy after I criticized her apartment on the blog (actually, I confess, more for its very existence in the old Y building than for its artistic/design shortcomings), and so I was kind of worried that one or another of her friends might recognize me and punch me in the nose. Mainly they said, “Hey, you’re the guy in that movie with Cindy.” But sure enough, one of the first people I ran into was, Stefan, the guy who designed the apartment. He was dressed as an old time Chinese cooley; his explanation: “We’ll all be Chinese some day.” We talked about how gentrification is a double-edged sword: while the city is safer, much of its vibrancy has been drained. (This is certainly true, though actually, if you don’t have a lot of money, it’s pretty much just a single-edged sword.)
And no, he didn’t punch me in the nose. Nor did the artist who designed the gold Gucci chainsaw 
and the Chanel AK-47—and, more recently, the gold-plated Gucci alligator. He and his girlfriend were dressed in running suits and had lots of knives and axes strapped onto themselves: “Take everything literally,” he said when asked to explain.
Serena Bass (who used to have a club in the basement of the Chelsea) catered the event, providing yummy appetizers including tomato-coconut discs, cheese sticks, black angus skewers, and mini lox-and-cream-cheese wraps. I meant to say hi to Paul Richard—whose photo (by Julia Calfee)appears in Legends much in the tricksterish spirit of his own art, but he left before I could say Hello, off to the Gagosian, no doubt.
The only other Chelsea resident in attendance was the fashion designer Zaldy (17 years at the hotel), who wore a gauzy cape (I think), his vision of the future looking oddly similar to one of his own forward-looking designs of today. Well, at least some of us are prepared for what’s to come. — Ed Hamilton
Heads up all of you fabric and textile designers and in general all of you creative people here at the Chelsea Hotel. BD Hotels is being sued for knocking off Eames patterns at the Pod Hotel. That’s no surprise to us however, as the whole place is chintzy by definition.
We’ve been suggesting for a while that BD’s strategy is to bankrupt the hotel so that they can buy it cheap. How else to explain their slashing of rates, warehousing of rooms, doubling of staff and otherwise mismanaging the hotel. In an interview for The New York Sun Richard Born comes clean on his strategy:
"I probably get a call every day from someone asking if I want to joint venture or invest in their new hotel project. When I discuss the perils of new development at this time most people laugh and suggest that I just want to discourage others from building so I can monopolize that market myself. My response is simply that I would rather purchase new hotels from the banks in three years at 50% discount, than invest at full price today."
He goes into some rigamarole about declining occupany rates and the like which I don’t have the patience to attempt to decipher at this moment, but according to Born, the bottom line is:
"…That would surely be enough to effectively bankrupt every newly built hotel and any existing hotel carrying a large debt burden." — Ed Hamilton
Here’s an example of how the minority share holders and BD Hotel are capitalizing on the Chelsea’s historical spaces. (Please note that some of the videos and photos are Not Safe for Work or for your children.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8BS835fcVY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tuyBflxufg
Living with Legends 
