There's a current that courses through the old Chelsea Hotel, an electricity that drives people relentlessly to create. It's an energy that longtime resident and creator of "Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog" Ed Hamilton will tell you often drives inhabitants to madness. In a series of linked cyanide capsules, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel tells the odd, funny, and often tragic truth of the writers, artists, and musicians — the famous and the obscure alike — who have fallen prey to the Chelsea. Readers enter one of Dee Dee Ramone's flashbacks; meet the ghost of author Thomas Wolfe; learn of movie star Ethan Hawke's mystical powers over women; see the ungodly acts allegedly being perpetrated in the basement club Serena's; and feel the dark aura of Room 100, where punk rocker Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend Nancy. Other Chelsea residents past and present who will be included: Ryan Adams, club kid/murderer Michael Alig, Sarah Bernhardt, the Warhol Factory's Richard Bernstein, Victor Bockris, Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen, Lesbian activist Storme DeLarverie, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Janis Joplin, Jack Kerouac, Madonna, Edgar Lee Masters, Arthur Miller, Edie Sedgwick, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Dylan Thomas, and Rufus Wainwright.
In the 1980s I was living in Washington, D.C., going to graduate school and teaching philosophy at the University of Maryland. I was sick of philosophy by this point but, like most people in D.C., I was really into politics. I also spent more time writing about politics than I did on my work for graduate school. I convinced myself that I needed to get a PhD and teach philosophy, even though all I wanted to do was write. Finally, along with my girlfriend, I packed up and moved to New York with the express intent to live in the Chelsea Hotel.
My first non-fiction book, "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca," was an extension of Hotel Chelsea blog, which started as a chronicle of the outrageous events that always seem to happen at the hotel, but with the removal of the Bard Family, turned into a eulogy of sorts.
I hope that "Legends" will draw attention to this unique cultural institution, so that interested people who can help will lend a hand and hopefully save us from the greed of the developers who are overrunning New York. There ought to be a place in this city for people who are concerned about something more than simply lining their pockets. New York is the Arts capital of the world, but it will not be for long if artists cannot afford to live here. I am optimistic that the Chelsea Hotel will yet be reborn in coming years, albeit maybe in some other form, as a haven for the arts.
You can find my recent fiction in various small literary magazines and online publications.
