This Ain't No Holiday Inn - Softcover

James Lough

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936182521 ISBN 13: 9781936182527

Publisher: Independent Publishers Group, 2013

Synopsis

During its heyday, the Chelsea Hotel in New York City was a home and safe haven for Bohemian artists, poets, and musicians such as Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Alan Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, and Dee Dee Ramone. This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic façade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s. Providing a window into the late Bohemia of New York during that time, countless interviews and firsthand accounts adorn this social history of one of the most celebrated and culturally significant landmarks in New York City.

About this title

About the Author

James Lough is the former director of the creative writing program at Savannah College of Art and Design, where he currently teaches full-time. He is the author of Sites of Insight, which won the Colorado Endowment of Humanities Award. He is also the winner of the Frank Waters Southwestern Writing Award for short fiction. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Excerpt. İ Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This Ain't No Holiday Inn

Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995

By James Lough

Schaffner Press

Copyright İ 2013 James Lough and Robert Campbell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-936182-52-7

Contents

INTRODUCTION, 
Chapter 1 : CHECKING IN, 
Chapter 2 : CHELSEA WILDNESS, 
Chapter 3 : THE THREE WISE MEN OF DOPE: Beat Writers Huncke, Corso, and Matz, 
Chapter 4 : THREE CHORDS AND A GRUDGE: Dee Dee Ramone and the Chelsea Hotel Blues, 
Chapter 5 : GETTING BY, 
Chapter 6 : STANLEY BARD: Steel Fist in Velvet Glove, 
Chapter 7 : CHELSEA PORTRAITS, 
Chapter 8 : CHECKING OUT, 
Chapter 9 : 21ST CENTURY AFTERMATH, 
Epilogue : FAUXHEMIA: Does the Death of Bohemia Matter?, 
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
ENDNOTES, 

CHAPTER 1

Checking In

It is strange how people seem to belong to places — especially to places where they were not born.

— CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, The Berlin Stories

THE LOBBY: A ROGUE'S GALLERY

When the spiky-haired tourist had taken his photograph and proceeded out the big glass front door, I hurriedly grabbed my bags and stepped out from under the candy-striped awning and inside the Chelsea's famous lobby.

The place was stone quiet and more cramped than I'd envisioned. Artwork was ubiquitous, paintings crammed up and down the yellow walls. There was the ornate Victorian fireplace, its mantelpiece sporting Rene Shapshack's bust of Harry Truman.

Of all people to honor on the mantel of the anti-establishment Chelsea Hotel! The little bullet of a president from Missouri who dropped the atom bomb on Japan. The symbol of true blue America fair-and-square, showcased prominently here at Bohemian Central. No doubt the hotel's manager and part-owner Stanley Bard had long-since transcended the irony. No doubt he could wax on about how, back in the day, he had bartered X amount of Shapshack's rent for the statue and how much its value had multiplied over the years.

The quality of the Chelsea's lobby art is up for dispute. Its placement on the walls didn't seem to follow any organizing principle. Larry Rivers' pop-art masterpiece "The Dutch Masters" hangs prominently in all its glory, but what's with the huge, goofy, amateurish painting of a black flowerpot? To the right of the fireplace, there's a nice Phillip Taaffe pin-wheel abstraction, but over there, above the display case full of travel brochures, there's a tinsel metallic curly-cue contrivance that hurts the eyes.

My brother-in-law Robert Campbell states it more plainly.

ROBERT CAMPBELL

In the lobby, you've got some of the crappiest artwork you ever saw in your life. Some of it looks like artwork you'd see in the waiting room of a doctor's office. But there's some stuff that's good.

The real reason for the art's spotty quality may be simpler.

MARY ANNE ROSE

Stanley took the best paintings home.

Stanley Bard, the hotel's manager and part owner for over fifty years, has denied accepting artworks in lieu of rent payments (the hotel's co-owners would have probably disapproved). But the residents know better. Not only was the lobby chock full, but every hallway on every floor was lined with paintings, prints, and drawings. Every stairway was plastered with artwork strung up in diagonal rows. Mobiles hung from the ceilings — sculptures rose from the floors. Did the artists just donate their work out of adoration for Bard and the hotel?

The Chelsea's abundant art may not be worth all that much. In a recent legal dispute between the hotel's owners, the artwork — so much that if they pulled it all off the walls you'd think the building would collapse — was appraised at a total of only around $900,000. More evidence that Bard took the best stuff home.

As I carried my bags through the lobby, I recognized, to my left, the cubby-like room I'd seen in movies, the iconic little space with the payphones and the marble floors. In the 1980s, cell phones were almost nonexistent. And despite the fact that two-thirds of the residents were not transients, but "permanent," living there indefinitely, the Chelsea was still, after all, a hotel. As with any hotel, outgoing phone calls made from your room were outrageously expensive. So residents plodded down to the lobby's payphones.

JULIE EAKIN

In the middle of the night or whenever, we'd always be going down there in pajamas. Calls cost a dime. You'd pull the doors shut — it was one of those glass jobs, so you could see all the business going on in the lobby as you were sitting in there talking.

What made the little phone room iconic wasn't the marble floors or the phone booths themselves, but what happened there over the phone, from the ordinary to the sublime: lovers arranging rendezvous, having knockdown drag outs, ordering pizzas or pot. Actor Ethan Hawke, understanding the payphones' symbolic resonance as the counterculture's Communications Central, featured them in his movie Chelsea Walls.

Architecture is Frozen Music

You can't talk about Chelsea culture or people without talking about the building itself. A building's character, after all, shapes the characters inside.

DIMITRI MUGIANIS

The Chelsea is almost like a beautiful fortress. Architecturally, it was gorgeous! There were balconies I liked to sit outside on. In addition, inside, the staircase is beautiful, and there were working fireplaces in the rooms. I know they've fixed the hotel up now, but the state of disrepair it was in when we lived there, was so charming, like a beautiful old whore whose beauty was fading.

JULIE EAKIN

The building was a little macabre — it was much disheveled when I lived there with Dimitri. It was not kept well, nothing like it is now. It was much dingier — it wasn't cleaned as often. Almost anybody could easily sneak up the back stairway into the hallways.

It cost five hundred dollars a month for a big, square room with a beautiful fireplace that didn't work. There were the two bays with the front doors and the balcony, and it had beautiful parquet floors and tall ceilings that must have been twelve feet high. The bathroom was outside in the hall and was shared by two other apartments, one on either side.

The Hotel Chelsea has an ugly-duckling sort of stateliness. Built during the transition between Victorian and Edwardian periods, it shows the influence of both. Call it Awkwardian. If you were to show an innocent bystander a picture of the building, they might guess it was an old insane asylum, back when straitjackets were in vogue. With its high gables, skinny chimneys, its homely-ornate brick façade, and florid wrought-iron balconies, the Hotel Chelsea is gothic, at least in the literary sense of the word.

The hotel's fortress-like construction had its advantages, especially when it housed a bunch of hard-living libertines. Its builders made the interior walls extra-thick for two reasons, the first being so residents wouldn't be bothered by their neighbors' noise; the second was to prevent fires from spreading from room to room. In fact, the builders poured sand, a dependable fire retardant, between the building's steel girders to prevent this from occurring and risk engulfing the whole hotel. When Chelsea rooms have caught fire, they may have burned themselves bare, smoke and flames surging outside through the windows, but the adjoining rooms were not affected.

The unburnable Chelsea Hotel was built in 1883 during the great surge of the Industrial Revolution, a time of opulence, ostentation and robber barons. In fact, Mark Twain (maybe during his own nights at the Chelsea?) coined the period "The Gilded Age."

The Chelsea still bears traces of these lavish times. At the time it was built, it was New York's tallest building, towering over the city at an awe-inspiring twelve floors. It was not designed to be a hotel, but a "co-op," similar to today's condominium complexes, where people could purchase their units and own them. But what units! The apartments, especially those on the top floors, were enormous, their square footage running in the several thousands. The penthouse apartments were comprised of two stories, and when viewed from the outside, it almost looks as though a giant crane had lifted a few two-story houses and placed them side-by -side on top, creating an exclusive little neighborhood on the roof.

If New York was doing well during the Gilded Age, the Chelsea District positively thrived. The Chelsea Hotel sat at the epicenter of New York's Theater District. Playhouses, opera houses, and vaudeville houses were strewn throughout the neighborhood. The world-renowned actor Sarah Bernhardt made her home in one of the Chelsea's penthouses. The pyramid she had built for her roof survives to this day. As a wealthy celebrity, Ms. Bernhardt could afford such extravagances. Where there's a whim, there's a way. But most actors were dirt poor, exploited by the big theater syndicates and struggling to form labor unions. Still, the scores of less well-heeled actors kept the Chelsea District lively.

Unfortunately for the Chelsea district, around 1905, theater owners found bigger, cheaper spaces to build music houses and cabarets on a street called Broadway. The entire theater district packed up and moved north. You know the rest of the story. With its lively theater scene gone, the Chelsea neighborhood began to decline. The wealthy Chelsea dwellers moved on as well. The building was turned into a hotel, albeit a "residence hotel" that had rooms for tourists (whom Chelsea insiders called "transients") and actual apartments for permanent residents. The Chelsea remained so until very recently: one part hotel, two parts apartment building. While it is best known for its artists, it is also renowned for its unique design features. For instance, you can't mention the hotel's architecture without referring to its staircase.

JULIE EAKIN

The central stairwell, in particular, is a really resonant, romantic space. It goes up for ten flights and has the wrought iron banister all the way up — it's very identifiable.

PETER JOHANSSON

You can see the famous stairway in a lot of movies, like The Professional, which was shot at the Chelsea. Look at that movie, and you'll see how the Chelsea used to look. There's a scene where a very young Natalie Portman is sitting and smoking a cigarette, dangling her feet. They show you an eagle's eye view of the stairs with their black and white tiles. That movie really gives you a feel of what the inside of the Chelsea was all about.

I approached the cluttered front desk area. Up to the right, there hung a painting by Abstract-Expressionist Herbert Gentry, a nice painting of spontaneous, swirling brushstrokes forming themselves into human figures, but it was grimy, in sore need of a cleaning. No different, I guess, than the rest of the Chelsea.

I had assumed the hotel's staff would be bored with starry-eyed tourists brimming with questions about the hotel's history. But the desk clerk was an affable, talkative man, perfectly willing to play up its reputation. He escorted me up the ancient elevator — Creak! Clang! — and down the quiet hallway. Same as bellmen anywhere, he insisted on helping me carry my two small, lightweight bags into my room, and waited politely for his tip.

A Man's Cave is His Castle

When I saw Room 626, my heart sank. It was dim and shaped like a narrow wedge. No doubt, the owners had split it off a larger room to double the money collected from the same square footage. The furniture was period Salvation Army. The view out the enormous window was not of 23rd Street, but of the little concrete courtyard in back, glistening wet, where a single aluminum chaise longue reclined next to a fruit crate on which to set your drink. My room, I realized, was in back.

Almost every long-term resident I had spoken to referred to their room at the Chelsea not as a room but as a house. They would say, quite unselfconsciously, "Once there was a party at Marty Matz's house for Herbert Huncke," or "One of his junkie friends used to go over to her house and do drugs and get all freaky." Of course there were no actual houses. They were rooms, usually tiny, cramped rooms, barely big enough for a twin-sized bed. Was this misnomer just a Chelsea tradition, a piece of local jargon that residents absorbed by osmosis? Was it wish fulfillment? Call it a house long enough and it will become one? Or was there something so comfortable about the Chelsea's atmosphere that turned a little room into a pleasant, inviting home?

Because my room was in back and off the street, it was surprisingly quiet. No street noise floated up through the window, no shouts from the sidewalk or taxi horns. Sadly, the back rooms had no balconies. (At the Chelsea, balconies are prized real estate). But if I left my room and walked down to the end of the hallway, I could step out a big, unscreened window and get some fresh air on the fire escape's tiny landing.

Left alone in my cramped abode, I found myself rummaging for history. I examined every piece of furniture for artifacts left behind, a match-book or a little plastic cocktail sword. Maybe a novelist or rock star had scribbled a message in the closet's dark corner. I checked behind the big framed mirror hanging on the wall — nothing. But sure enough, when I pulled out an empty drawer of my flimsy old dresser, there was a poem written in bold black marker on the bottom:

    Two dollars
    and
    another steel car ride
    from fresh
    sights
    and
    new sounds
    all containing
    the same
    stale urine
    smell
    embedded in the
    New York City
    sidewalk

Beneath it, in red marker, a critic had penned a response:

Go back to Peoria, sucka!

At the Chelsea, such missives-left-behind are not uncommon. Julie Eakin, who moved into her room during the mid-80s, found a giant fresco scribbled onto her wall.

JULIE EAKIN

We got our room from a couple who had to break their lease. I think they were from New Zealand. They had left us a jar of marmalade on the mantel, and two black coats in the closet — one woman's coat and one man's coat. They were our sizes perfectly, and they were very hip!

Also, painted in black on the wall, was this huge argument in dialogue. It was huge! The part that I remember said, "You started it!"

It was Room 319, which is on the front of the hotel, just to the right of the lower part of the famous Hotel Chelsea sign. There are two French doors that lead out onto the balcony there. We actually had a hot plate and a toaster oven in our room, because that was the only way we could cook. It was probably illegal, due to fire codes, but I'm sure they knew that we were doing it, because all we had was a bathroom sink in the corner. So we would make Thanksgiving dinner in the toaster oven!

When my mom visited, I think I did begin to see it through her eyes. There were extraordinarily huge water bugs and roaches. She was absolutely appalled. I don't blame her! I remember watching her clean my phone at some point, and thinking, "Oh, it never occurred to me to clean a phone!"

DAVID LAWTON

It was such a dump! Those couple of floors, the second and third floors, we still regard as "the dump floors." The rooms were a mess, the hallway smelled of pot and cat piss!

But this didn't deter our young artists, for whom cleanliness was beside the point.

DIMITRI MUGIANIS

Moving in was great! There were all these other young people who were doing things, creating things, and the older people who were doing things, those people I had always looked up to. At one point, in the course of a single month, Tom Waits was living there, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman's trumpet player, was there, and Gil Scott Heron lived there too. You could talk to these people in the hallway!

The very first day I lived there, I opened the door and was going to go out to the store, and Julian Beck, from the Living Theater, was opening the door next to me. I looked at his face — which is a helluva face — and I just closed the door! I was terrified! But I said to myself, "Wow, this is a great place!"

DAVID LAWTON

It was such a wacky universe, with little celebrities passing through! Anthony Kiedis from the Chili Peppers for instance, and you'd see minor celebrities passing through for short periods of time.

ROBERT CAMPBELL

Everybody who moves into the Chelsea wants to know what famous person once lived in his or her room. Big Paul [Romero] had Bob Dylan's room, 319, where Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." John Wayne had also lived there. Sarah Bernhardt. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea. And Julian Schnabel, the painter who made it huge in the 80s, lived up there, the guy with the busted plates. And my friend Scott Covert had Dylan Thomas' room, either that or maybe it was O. Henry's.

PAUL VOLMER

There was this vibe of history going through there. There are the plaques outside, with the names of Brendan Behan and all these luminaries. And you're in your late teens or early twenties — even into your thirties — before you get your teeth kicked in. You've still got the idealism. You want to write, and you want to perform, and you think your shit doesn't stink. It was a great place to do that with a bunch of other people doing it at the same time.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from This Ain't No Holiday Inn by James Lough. Copyright İ 2013 James Lough and Robert Campbell. Excerpted by permission of Schaffner Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1936182521
• ISBN 13: 9781936182527
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320