The Chelsea Hotel
in
New York City
© Ulrich Rossmann All Rights reserved
18th of April 2018
As I saw a picture in the New York Times with the scaffolding beeing put up for refurbishment of the Chelsea Hotel, my thoughts had to go back 10 years.
I will never forget that I had the honour to be one of the guests in 2008.
In one of my pictures you will see the protest banners calling for 'Bring the Bard's back !'.
That was the time when the hotel was not longer run by the original owners Stanley Bard.
Here is the article being published by the NYT announcing his death on Feb. 14th 2017
by Sam Roberts
Stanley Bard, a Robin Hood of innkeepers who nurtured talented writers and artists and tolerated assorted deadbeats as the manager and part-owner of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan for more than 40 years, died on Tuesday in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was a stroke, his son, David, said.
The Chelsea, a venerable 12-story Victorian Gothic structure on West 23rd Street, was already a New York cultural landmark with a reputation as a bohemian sanctuary when Mr. Bard’s father, David, bought an ownership stake in it in 1947. (Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe, among others, stayed here). Stanley began working there in 1957 as a plumber’s assistant with a college degree.
When his father died in 1964, Mr. Bard took over as manager and began running the hotel with a studied obliviousness until he was forced out in a power struggle in 2007.
“The most beloved — and enigmatic — character ever to grace the halls of the Chelsea is, of course, our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard,” Ed Hamilton, a tenant, wrote in “Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living With Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca” (2007). “Among his many endearing qualities, Stanley possesses a congenital inability to admit that anything bad has ever taken place in the hotel.”
His positivism bordered on the pathological. “Early in the book,” Jeff Giles wrote of “Legends of the Chelsea Hotel” in The New York Times Book Review, “Hamilton passes along a former tenant’s story of seeing a swarm of policemen on the ninth floor and assuming that Joe the junkie had finally OD’d. Bard corrected him: The police officers were in fact guests at the hotel, and the junkie was vacationing abroad. The tenant, it seems, had been misled by the stretcher, the corpse and the body bag.”
The filmmaker Milos Forman, appearing in Abel Ferrara’s 2008 documentary “Chelsea on the Rocks,” teasingly asked Mr. Bard on camera whether any guest had ever died at his hotel. Mr. Bard cited just one, in 1988: the portrait painter Alphaeus Cole,
who lived to be 112.
He neglected to mention, among others, Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death and was rushed to a hospital emergency room from the hotel in 1953, or Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who was stabbed to death in their room in 1978. (He was charged with her murder but died of a heroin overdose while free on bail in 1979 before the case went to trial.)
While Mr. Bard presided over it, the Chelsea was also home to Viva, the Andy Warhol film star; the artists Larry Rivers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Christo wrapped Jeanne-Claude, his wife, there); the singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen (who wrote a song about it, “Chelsea Hotel #2”); and the punk rock musician Dee Dee Ramone (who caricatured Mr. Bard in a horror novel he wrote).
The Chelsea was where Jack Kerouac worked on “On the Road,” where Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where William Burroughs wrote “Naked Lunch” and where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
Mr. Bard lent long-term tenants money and tolerated their overdue bills; he embraced their eccentricities and encouraged their cultural ambitions. When Timur Cimkentli, a photographer, owed back rent, Mr. Bard hired him as a bellman.
Mr. Cimkentli told NPR in 2011 that Mr. Bard “was kind of like a huge leaf that kids could go under away from the storm, and that was the rarity of this hotel, that he would keep you on, he would see you, and you would owe him two months’ rent and you would cry to him and he would say, ‘Don’t worry, keep painting, keep painting.’”
Arthur Miller, who wrote his play “After the Fall” there, recalled in the literary magazine Granta in 2002 that when he moved into the Chelsea in 1960, “I did not know quite what to make of Mr. Bard.”
“A blue-eyed Hungarian Jew,” Mr. Miller continued, “short and with a rather clear, delighted round face, full of energy, he waved a hand over the room saying: ‘Everything is perfect. All the furniture is brand new, new mattresses, drapes. Look in the bathroom.’
“As we walked to the bathroom, I noticed a worn path down the middle of the carpet and what felt like coal dust crunching under my shoes. ‘The carpet,’ I started to say, but he cut me off. ‘A new carpet is coming tomorrow,’ he said with raised index finger, and one knew he had not thought of replacing the carpet until that very minute.”
Mr. Bard, Mr. Miller wrote, had a “talent for overriding probability, an emotional fluency which sent his thoughts on swallow loops from subject to subject, a progressive, enthusiastic view of life.
“In a word, anarchy.”
Mr. Bard was born on June 16, 1934, in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His mother was the former Fanny Amigo. His father, David, quit work as a furrier because of his allergies and bought the Chelsea with two other investors.
Stanley Bard graduated from Christopher Columbus High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from New York University, where he also studied psychology — a discipline, he later explained, that came in handy when he decided to join his father as a hotelier after serving in the Army following the Korean War.
His first wife, the former Alice Beer, died in 1988. In addition to their son, David, who also worked at the hotel, he is survived by their daughter, Michele Bard Grabell; his wife, the former Phyllis Habber, from whom he was separated; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Bard was replaced as the Chelsea’s managing partner in 2007 by descendants of the other original investors. The hotel was subsequently sold. He retired to Florida in 2009, leaving a legacy of ghosts.
Arthur Miller, in his Granta article, remembered when the grit in his hotel room carpet had gotten so deep that he erupted in a rage over the phone.
“For Christ’s sake, Stanley,” he recalled shouting, “don’t you have a vacuum cleaner in the house!
“Of course! We have lots of them.
“Then why aren’t they ever used?
“They’re not used?
“Stanley! You know goddamned well they don’t use them!
“I never heard of such a thing! Why don’t they use them?
“You’re asking me why they don’t use them?
‘Well, you’re the one who brought it up.
“Look, just get a vacuum cleaner up here and let’s forget this conversation.
“Fine. How are you otherwise?
“‘Truthfully, there is no otherwise — all I am is a man waiting desperately for a vacuum cleaner.’ And he would laugh,” Mr. Miller wrote, “grateful for another happy tenant.”
