The Chelsea Hotel on west 23rd St is reputed to be the last Bohemian place on earth. Placed on the national register of historic places, this big red building in Manhattan with its florid iron balconies and red striped canopy is indeed unique. Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Tenessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, all stayed here at some point. The Chelsea hotel is still active as a literary landmark, a tradition that hasn't faded with the years - and, even worse, the hype. Many artists still call this home and tourists can mingle with the eccentric residents for $195-$295 a night, a bargain in Manhattan.
The Chelsea hotel was opened in 1884 as one of the city's earliest co-operative apartment homes and became a hotel in 1905. It is essentially a family business. Stanley Bard is a neatly dressed, soft-spoken man, whose father ran the place and established its reputation as artist-friendly. Stanley takes me into his office; his daughter works beside him, and her children probably will too. Amid the clutter of the office - paintings hanging at crooked angles, an avalanche of paperwork, frescos of cavorting angels on the ceiling - Stanley reflects on the past and enthuses about the future. "My father wasn't into the arts but he loved people. He worked here seven days a week, 15 hours a day his whole life. He developed a relationship with people and had them living here a long time.
He knew Dylan Thomas. I studied Arts in school, I know every artist in the city and it's my collection that you see in the lobby and in the halls." Mr Bard himself is writing a book about the hotel through his own eyes. He was a friend of Behan. "Brilliant writer. Always drinking. I heard he was trouble but his publisher begged me to let the Chelsea work its charms so he could finish the book. Brendan behaved here, he was responsive, he respected what the Chelsea accomplished and the mystical way it has." Behan did indeed write some of his work while resident here in the spring of 1963, including Brendan Behan's New York. His plaque on the pillar at the entrance reads, "To America my new-found land. The man that hates you, hates the human race." One morning Behan was to be interviewed by a priest. Beatrice, his wife, was distraught that the writer was so disheveled. Stanley Bard took Behan into this very office and shaved him himself. Now that's service!
Where else can you wake, a tourist among so many famous ghosts? Today some Germans are heaving suitcases through the lobby under a pink, life-size sculpture of a fat lady dangling from a swing; original art adorns the walls, a myriad of puppets hover just above the phones. Outside, bronze plaques are affixed to cracked white pillars; one states that Thomas Wolfe spent the last years of his life in one of these rooms. Dylan Thomas, another plaque reads, "lived and labored here at the Chelsea Hotel and from here sailed out to die." This is the last step before institutionalisation, a resident artist quips. It tells a truer tale of what it means to be a creative person than Shakespeare's Stratford-on-Avon or Yeats's Lissadell. That even the great writers die alone, without homes, leaving nothing behind them except words.