Take the Cannoli (9 page)

The Chelsea is strictly mom-and-pop. Or, more precisely, father and son. Stanley Bard's father David took over the hotel in 1939. Stanley Bard came on in 1957, assuming management in 1964, when his father died. Bard calls the Chelsea his father's “second child.” He says that as a little boy—he was five the first time he set foot in the Chelsea—he was often jealous of his architectural sibling: “My mother would drag me down here as a little child to see him.” (“I used to love to ride
the lift,” he says, proving that he is, in effect, now working in what used to be his playground.) But in those days, his father worked “fifteen to twenty hours a day.” Which didn't stop him from putting his own children through the same form of orphanhood when he took over. “I'm here very often twelve to fifteen hours every day,” he sighs. And now he runs the place with his son, David, who has worked here for nearly a decade.

Stanley Bard talks about his tenants with paternal pride. He boasts, “I've had the pleasure of knowing these people, knowing them well, and seeing their development.” He sounds more like a guidance counselor from
Fame
than a service-industry bureaucrat. “I try to understand their needs,” he says. “We're very compassionate. Creative people need that. They need to feel that they're being considered; they need to feel that they are happy in their surroundings.” Three decades of dealing with the freakier angels and devils of our culture has left Bard bilingual in English and Artspeak. Not that I've chatted up that many hotel managers, but I can't imagine many of them throwing around the terminology of painting as nonchalantly as Stanley Bard. “I've seen all the movements,” he points out. “The pop movement. The neorealistic movement.”

When Bard names names, he breaks his famous tenants down by medium. You can tell he's rattled off the list so often and so fast that he's stitched each discipline into one huge Frankensteinian art monster. “Just in painting and sculpture,” he chirps, “deKooningDavidSmithJasperJohnsLarryRiversChristo. And in acting,
SarahBernhardtJaneFondaElliottGouldKrisKristofferson. A lot of nice people.”

It's obvious that one of the joys of Bard's job is the intellectual challenge involved in thirty years of keeping up his end of the conversation. “Christo was a person who I really didn't understand. He wrapped everything in his room. One of his early works: He used to wrap his wife, Jeanne-Claude. A beautiful woman. And I said, ‘Christo, I don't understand. What are you trying to say?' Because I used to question everyone. They felt sorry for me and my lack of knowledge. He said, ‘You look at a woman and you just accept her. They're really beautiful objects. So what better way could I do by showing my art by wrapping a beautiful woman?' ”

Something tells me they aren't having this conversation over at the Grand Hyatt uptown.

I find myself staring at that condom wrapper every time I am in the room. I keep humming Leonard Cohen's song “Chelsea Hotel #2,” his supposed ode to Janis Joplin. Its beginning is sweet enough—“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel”—then gets rather to the point: “Giving me head on the unmade bed.” Gosh. Call me picky, but after nearly a week with someone else's sexual detritus, I decide that Cohen's word-picture is fine enough subject matter for a pop song but not fine at all as a situation, as a fact of hostelry.

After I get over the initial gross-out, my bourgeois alarm goes off. Am I being too middle class? A prude? Of course, in any other hotel, I'd call the front desk immediately to complain. But staying at the
Chelsea necessarily involves a certain self-reflection. In other words, if this was good enough for Arthur Miller, shouldn't it be good enough for the lesser likes of me? When Miller wrote that the Chelsea was outside of America, didn't he mean outside of McCarthyite America? The bad one? That “no vacuum cleaners, no rules” bit of his—wasn't that a slam against all that is small-minded and neatnik and shackled? Like, isn't my preconception that this erotic garbage should have been thrown away before my arrival a . . . rule, man?

When I tell journalist Lance Loud, a former Chelsea denizen, about the wrapper on the floor, he laughs the guffaw of recognition: “As opposed to most hotels where they go around and clean the rooms, I'm sure the [Chelsea] maids go around from room to room and leave the used condoms and wrinkle up the sheets and blow their noses on the washcloths just so you know that that price you're paying is for genuine, New York circa-the-sixties cachet, no matter how germ-ridden it might be.”

Loud, who has the distinction of being one of the first persons to come out on national television, moved to the Chelsea in 1971. It was during the filming of
An American Family,
a proto–
Real World
PBS documentary series which followed Lance's Santa Barbara family for a year. The first episode shows an under-the-weather Lance phoning home from his “crummy pad in New York” at the Chelsea, asking his sister to “send me my scarves.”

“My first contact with the Chelsea Hotel,” he recalls, “was as a rabid teenager from suburban southern California who was reading
anything he could about the strange and exotic state of mind called Andy Warhol, which seemed so anarchic and so far away and so contrary to everything I knew.” Then he saw Warhol's film
The Chelsea Girls,
a split-screen, three-and-a-half-hour bore/smut fest, which shows things like Ondine shooting speed and Nico in tears. Its poster, a nude woman-as-hotel in which the Chelsea's entrance is situated at her vagina, was like some exotic travel brochure to Lance Loud. To him, it was his dream destination: “Some people want to go to Valhalla. Some people want to go to El Dorado or Shangri-La. When I was a teenager, I wanted to end up at the Chelsea Hotel. With or without a needle in my arm and lipstick on my face.” He arrived at the hotel as the kept companion of a psychotic drug addict. Who says dreams can't come true?

“I was terrified,” Loud recalls. “It's one thing to dream about this Gothic mansion of debauchery,” he says. “But it's another thing for a fairly innocent young urchin from the suburbs to come and actually stay there.” He's grateful for the experience: “I don't want to be a bummer about it. You got the feeling that it was full of a lot of disembodied people who were on the road to some other reality. Purgatory is a cathartic thing. The best parts of life sometimes are kill or cure.”

Actually, though Loud's tale is almost comically grim, it does get to the heart of the Chelsea's noir appeal. The Chelsea isn't so much a hotel as a hideout, a refuge, a hospice. It is said that Loud's then neighbor Patti Smith ended up here, cradling an ill Robert Mapplethorpe in her arms, because she could think of nowhere else to go, could imagine no
other sanctuary in New York for a couple of down-and-out oddballs who, like so many, happened to have big dreams but no money, hoping that the Chelsea would take them in. Stanley Bard welcomed them: “I liked them. They were nice, honest people who came to me and said they had no money and someday they would. Would I trust them and go along with them? Yes.”

Who doesn't crave a little refuge (or a loan) at least once in life, especially when you're young and broke, or old and broke, or moving up, or slipping away? People don't always need, don't always want, a clean well-lighted place. As an outsider passing through, the Chelsea felt like a lonely place, solitary and sad. But the nice thing about loneliness (and solitude and sadness) is the silence. The Chelsea is a very quiet place to think. And this could be its secret, its attraction for those with poems and pictures rattling round their heads. It is an oasis of hush in one the noisiest cities on earth. And the silence isn't just spiritual—it's real, technological; the Chelsea has the thickest of walls. In fact, one of my neighbors during my stay was English comedian Eddie Izzard, in town doing his one-man show
Dress to Kill.
In it, he had a bit about how he loved the hotel's dense walls because he could scream all he wanted at his computer, said he sat in his room every night yelling, “Log on! Log on! Log on! LOG ON!” No one ever heard a peep.

Arthur Miller, for a while, evidently found the less-than-sanitary site cathartic. “The Chelsea,” he wrote, “for all its irritants—the ageold dust in its drapes and carpets [corroboration!], the rusting pipes,
the leaking refrigerator, the air conditioner into which you had to keep pouring pitchers of water—was an impromptu, healing ruin.”

There is one man who has given a lot of thought to renovating the ruin—Stanley Bard's son David. Like his father, David hopes to pass the hotel on to his children. Unlike his father, he's caught in the middle between the place's past and tourism's future. A handsome, soft-spoken man in his thirties, David Bard is not unaware of the Chelsea's facilities (or lack thereof). This is a person who knows full well other hotels this size offer little bottles of shampoo, for instance. Or room service. Or minibars. This is the person responsible for the new phone system, for cable TV.

It is doubtful that even the shiniest of gadgets thoughtfully plopped into the hotel's rooms will outshine the glare of its grandly sad stories. This fact alone might prevent the kind of bourgeois, Disney-fired renovation taking place a few blocks north in Times Square. When I ask David Bard if he even thinks it's possible to Disney up Dylan Thomas, all he does is laugh. “No. Or Mapplethorpe.” That kind of revamp would turn the sad stories merely sick. What would there be? A Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Nightclub? Would there be an Arthur Miller–themed Death of a Salesman Business Center, equipped with computers and fax machines? A Sid and Nancy Honeymoon Suite?

In fact, what happened to Sid and Nancy's room is a testament to how the Bards have dealt with the darker side that sometimes comes
with the territory. Stanley Bard effectively destroyed Room 100 as an act of honor. He says of the killing, “Unfortunately we have to accept it. It's history and it did happen. I did not want it to become a legend for that reason. So we incorporated it into a large apartment which is now quite lovely. A very nice artist is living in that apartment.” And so the Bard family receives a few measly bucks from a nice artist instead of raking in the tourist dollars of rubbernecking necros.

And if young David Bard gets his way, major makeovers won't be happening any time soon. Sitting in front of a shelf that contains one of my college art history textbooks, David talks about his early, more difficult years at the hotel. “When I first got out of college,” he remembers, “I had this idea of literally gutting the building and renovating it and making everything clean corners, like a modern situation.” How alluring. How un-Chelsea. “A couple of the artists in the building, they said to me, ‘David, you don't want to get rid of the cracks and the crevices in the building because that's where the ghosts hide. And if you get rid of the ghosts, the Chelsea will just be any other building.' ”

I
HAD THIS THEORY, A
Chicago theory. After four years of walking back and forth across the Michigan Avenue Bridge, I had accumulated a few random facts about the bridge that coalesced into an actual hypothesis. Namely, that I could tell the whole history of America standing on that bridge. I thought I might be able to swivel around and point at the whole dark, inspiring tale. I had the following tidbits to go on: a couple of French explorers who, a plaque on the bridge said, passed by in 1673; an Indian massacre in 1812 right there in front of the Burger King; and vague notions of Abe Lincoln's debt to the
Chicago Tribune,
whose quaint Gothic tower looms over the bridge's north side. As any journalist knows, three instances is enough to establish a story, if not an actual trend, so I thought that's enough American history, and I could just make up the rest.

It turns out my theory was only too right. The intersection of Michigan and Wacker, I found out, isn't just a corner, it's a vortex. The
deeper I dug into the history of Chicago and its relationship to the history of the country, the more crowded the ghost traffic jam clogging up the Michigan Avenue Bridge got.

The beaux arts–style bridge was constructed in 1920. Standing on it, the Chicago River flows underneath. Looking east, it isn't far from where the river meets Lake Michigan. (The river used to flow into the lake, but in 1900, engineers reversed its flow to keep the city's sewage from being deposited into its drinking water. Now the sewage eventually flows into the Mississippi, which is appreciated in Chicago, but met with less enthusiasm downriver in St. Louis.) Looking south, the bridge hits land at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, where Chicagoans may purchase chocolate or eyeglasses. The view to the north is picture-postcard pretty, especially at night, when the white wedding cake of the Wrigley Building glows so soft you'd swear it's candlelit. Supposedly pictures of the building so delighted Joseph Stalin that the University of Moscow was designed in its image. And who can blame him, at least for that? In short, a 360-degree glance from the bridge offers the most dignified panorama in all Chicago. But under the Wacker Drive sidewalk, there's some very old blood seeping into the river.

The American national mythology revolves around the idea that the promise of America is best seen in the West—wide open spaces, don't fence me in, home, home on the range, etc. Metaphorically, that might be true. But economically, the real place to witness the promise of America is the Midwest, where, for most of this country's history, the
products of the range were manipulated for fun and profit. When the cowboys serenaded their stray calves to “Git Along, Little Dogies,” they left out the part where the little dogie is railroaded to Chicago to be slaughtered by some underpaid, overworked immigrant, en route to its manifest destiny as a New Yorker's supper.