Living with Legends

I was on the Joey Reynolds show Tuesday night promoting my book, Legends of the Chelsea.  It was great meeting Joey and his friend Cha Cha, who was on the Sopranos and acted in a couple of Abel Ferrara movies, in addition to owning a restaurant on Mulberry Street.  Joey and Cha Cha are two genuine New York characters of a kind that are, unfortunately, a vanishing breed.  They just talked about their day-to-day life in New York —about dieting and going to the diner and such–but managed to make it interesting just by the force of their personalities.  (A rare quality these days, as they pointed out: the guys on TV talk shows apparently need a team of dozens of writers.)  It was a pleasure to watch them work, and I wish I could be as entertaining as they are.
     In fact, I guess I was worried about that.  In the studio before the show we were talking about the great director (and living Chelsea Legend) Abel Ferrara and his upcoming documentary about the Chelsea Hotel.  Joey asked me if I was going to be in the film.  “Well,” I said, “He interviewed me for it, so maybe.  Though for all I know he may decide I’m too boring and cut my part out of it.”
          “Please don’t tell me you’re boring right before I put you on the air,” Joey sagely advised.

My fellow guest was a performance artist named Lilly who was inviting all New Yorkers to gather with her and watch the sunset on Thursday, November 8.  Neither Joey nor Cha Cha seemed to be able to quite get on board with this program—in fact I remember them asking Lilly more than once, “What’s the point?”  (They asked nicely, however.)  But I think Lilly just didn’t want to give away exactly what she was planning to do.

We talked mostly about what it was like to live in a hotel: they wanted to know if I got the sheets changed (definitely not); how it was having a bathroom down the hall (junkies get in, but at least the maid cleans it); and what it’s like having a procession of transients coming in and out (a mixed bag, though some fantastic musicians have stayed in the room next door).  Joey said he’d rent me a room for less than I was paying.

Anyway, Joey and Cha Cha’s questioning was great for me, because I didn’t have to make anything up on my own.  (I did manage to get in my speil about the injustice that has been done to the Bard family.)  But after the interview was over I started thinking that maybe I hadn’t described the book very well.  “Did I even remember to mention the title?” I asked the production assistant.  “Yeah, don’t worry, you did,” he assured me.

Well, that’s a relief.  The next guest after my hour was up was a guy who was going to talk about investing in gold.  Thank heavens I didn’t have to go on with him, because I know I can’t compete with that.  The gold we have here at the Chelsea may not quite be fool’s gold, but it is somewhat immaterial at best. — Ed Hamilton

Writers have been expending a lot of ink lately in trying to figure out who in their right mind would want to move into one of these leaky aquariums developers keep building all over New York City.  The short answer, according to Penelope Green in Sunday’s Week in Review section of the New York Times (“Yours for the peeping,” 11/4/07), is that it’s people who want to expose themselves.  (Like that oblivious hipster with the cell phone who strolled around nude in Times Square recently, I suppose, though he’s to be commended for going about it more directly.)  Green then launches into a long analysis of this tendency, worthy of the best speculative ramblings of Freud, which seems to conclude, basically, that You-tube and Facebook have confused these people to the extent that they don’t know what’s appropriate anymore and so have thrown up their hands and decided that they don’t care if the whole city sees them prancing around naked or not.

Though I’m sure Green has a point, I believe the real answer is a bit less complex, at least psychologically, though it does have two parts.  A blurb accompanying the article claims that these people are “goldfish by inclination,” but then again, even the goldfish don’t live in their bowls by choice.  If they stopped to think about it, they would probably rather be in a nice, spacious pond somewhere.  Unfortunately, they can’t do anything about it: someone just threw them in the bowl, and there they must live.  Analogously, the first part of the answer is that these people live there because that’s what developers are building these days.

     So then the question becomes: why are developers building these monstrosities?  Well, because the glass houses are cheap, pre-fab structures.  Quick and easy, down and dirty: you don’t have to pay a brick layer or a stone mason, you just slap up a truckload of rectangular panels and before you know it, you have a twenty-story skyscraper.  (The ones that were built early in the boom are a bit different, in that they are more unique, and often feature wavy glass and other nice touches, but they were the wedge that allowed the later cookie-cutter glass boxes to avoid scrutiny.)   The one nod to aesthetics is that at least the panels are transparent.  The buildings look nicer, admitedly, than if the developers had just slapped up sections of plywood or opaque fiberglass, but the practical result is the same.  Who cares if they leak, or if residents don’t have any privacy?  As long as they can be sold before they fall apart, developers stand to make millions of dollars.

By a strange coincidence, the second part of the answer as to why people live in these glass towers is provided by another front page story in the very same issue of the New York Times, this one in the real estate section (Foreign Buyers Take Manhattan).  Though I suppose Green wasn’t allowed to read the article in advance, what the author, Christine Haughney reports is that foreign buyers have purchased 1000 new condos in Manhattan in the past 18 months, constituting an amazing one-third of all condo sales for that period.  These apartments are sold, often sight unseen, to buyers who often have no intension of living in them, but are just planning to rent them out until the market takes an upturn, in which case they will sell them for a profit.  In other words, they are speculating in real estate as if it were the stock market.  So for one thing, they don’t see the glass towers, and for another, they don’t care what they look like or how they’re built.  As Green notes, when you do see inside of one of these apartments, it looks like a dorm room.  And that’s because it is: the speculators sublet the apartments to students (their captive “goldfish”), who are easy to get rid of when the time comes to sell.

     Speculation drives up the cost of apartments for those of us who actually want to live in New York City, and indeed forces a lot of the working and middle class out of the city entirely.  The real estate market outside of New York has recently been rocked by the subprime lending scandal, as banks gave mortgages to high-risk homebuyers.  But as Haugnney implies in her article, foreign buyers are risky as well, as they have no credit history in the U.S.  Perhaps New York, in so many respects on the cutting-edge, is just a little bit behind the curve in real-estate trends. — Ed Hamilton