The Chelsea hotel, on West 23rd Street, is still standing. But it is much diminished from the glory days when it hosted the likes of Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. The halls are dusty from sheetrock; the doors are plastic sheets taped to the wall. Developers are hoping to turn the place into a luxury hotel or condos. But there are still some people still clinging to the place.
Ed Hamilton always wanted to be a short-story writer. He arrived in New York a little over two decades ago, at the age of 30, moving with his wife from the Maryland suburbs. “I always wanted to come to New York, my wife always wanted to come to New York, and our jobs ended so we decided to just go ahead and do it,” Hamilton told me on a recent afternoon, sitting in a large, worn red armchair in the room he shares with his wife at the Chelsea. He’s only recently published his first book of short stories, titled The Chintz Age.
One of Hamilton’s favourite writers is Thomas Wolfe, he said. Wolfe had once lived at the Chelsea. But when Hamilton first approached Stanley Bard, the hotel’s landlord – known to take paintings in lieu of rent – Bard turned Hamilton down for a room, saying there was nothing available. Hamilton had to take a sublet from another tenant instead, for $500 a month.
“It was a room about a half or a third of this size and it had, like, lofts for all your stuff, just a really crap place,” Hamilton said. “So we stayed there for a year and then Stanley Bard gave us our own place because he hates subletting. In fact, he can’t even say the word, he hates it so much.” They’ve been living in the hotel ever since.
Hamilton eventually wrote a blog and a book about all the legends of the Chelsea hotel. But his work of nostalgia was written as the conditions of the hotel crumbled. He and his wife have survived the onslaught of the developers who gradually took over the hotel and ousted Bard. It has been a rocky ride since then; the hotel was first sold to one developer, then another. They began extensive renovations, which cost a vast sum. In the process, they evicted many of the artists living there. Hamilton made it past those hurdles, but it’s not clear how much longer everyone will hold out. I asked Hamilton if there was any amount of money he’d leave for. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sure they could come up with some number.”
What happened to the Chelsea hotel has been replayed all over New York. There are few, if any, landlords left like Stanley Bard. Today, for a young, aspiring artist, it’s best to show up to New York with a credit report and a massive security deposit in hand. Even then, you probably won’t settle in Chelsea, or Manhattan, or even the more accessible parts of Brooklyn. (The average rental in Manhattan is hovering around $4,000 a month.)
The complaint that New York is getting too expensive is, of course, not new. Hamilton himself remembers being told by the artists he met all the way back in 1995 that he had missed out on New York’s heyday. “Oh yeah, the 80s were so great, the 70s were so great. You haven’t seen anything, this place is being all gentrified. It’s not like it used to be,’” he remembered them saying. Maybe it was something “old timers” always did, he said. “Although I must say that things seem to have really accelerated in the past few years.”
The stories in The Chintz Age are a monument to the New York he moved to and wanted to keep living in. It isn’t the successful artists that seem to interest him; instead, his stories follow people who are more like himself. In Fat Hippie Books, for example, the protagonist, Greg, is a bookstore owner who once had literary ambitions but has settled into the business. It’s a struggle to keep the doors open due to a greedy landlord.
“It wasn’t written in the stone of the buildings that neighbourhoods had to crumble and become shabby for Bohemians,” Hamilton writes, “but Greg had always been a believer and he was comfortable with that. His resolution was that he had to hold on in some way or the other and wait for the cycle to come back around.”
There are many statements like that in Hamilton’s stories. His characters aren’t usually stratospheric successes. They’re more like the people who, hearing of the louche adventures of Jack Kerouac and the other beats, moved to New York to try to emulate their lives. Some of his characters briefly make a living at what they love – Martha of the titular story briefly succeeds as a photographer – but on the whole, they are people who do their art for pleasure, not the money or the acclaim. That particular form of New Yorker – call it the demimonde or Bohemian or whatever you like – is vanishing as these people leave the last of the rent-stabilized apartments.
Hamilton idolized people who never really sought the approval of bourgeois authorities, people who were happy to earn only a couple hundred bucks a month. He admired their ingenuity. “I’ve seen that with the people that lived here [at the Chelsea hotel] too,” Hamilton said. “They’re just hustlers – they know how to do anything for a buck. If they don’t have money, they’ll go sell their books or they’ll sell their furniture. That’s one of the things you learn,” Hamilton said, “that artists just live basically from paycheck to paycheck.”
A paycheck from a gallery show every six months, or a book contract every two years, is no longer enough to cover even the tiniest room’s rent. Even a few nights of bartending won’t really cut it anymore. For Hamilton, this is an incalculable loss. “I remember in the space of a week, there was a punk rocker and a blues guitarist and a classical violinist and they all practiced in their rooms,” Hamilton told me. But the glorious “cacophony” that such musicians produced together is gone, because no one can afford the rent.
“Rents so high that if you’re, like, a young person coming from the sticks or whatever, you can’t really afford it,” Hamilton said.
- The Chintz Age is out now from Cervena Barva Press
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