Chelsea Now photo by Patrick Hedlund

A banner hangs from the Chelsea Hotel on W. 23rd St., which has been in turmoil since the ouster of its former management company.

Stink bombs, scuffles and ‘anarchy’ at Chelsea Hotel

By CHRIS LOMBARDI

The Chelsea Hotel has never strayed far from its rollicking roots. But last week turmoil engulfed the famed 125-year-old space in the wake of the firing of new managers hired less than a year ago and tasked with “upgrading” the landmark hotel/residence.

At last weekend’s 125th anniversary photo exhibit in the hotel’s ballroom, curator and photographer Linda Troeller, a longtime resident, had stink bombs planted on her doorstep and at the show, possibly because of her cozy relations with both old and new management at the turbulent outpost.

The next day, a confrontation between hotel vice president David Elder and longtime resident Arthur Nash concluded with Nash seeking emergency room treatment, after being muscled to the ground by newly hired security personnel. Meanwhile, tenants said, no one is actually overseeing the operational and security needs of either the hotel’s transient visitors or its 200 permanent tenants, leaving them subject to harassment by board members, the board’s newly hired security staff, and one another.

“It’s just anarchy,” Scott Griffin, co-chair of the hotel’s tenant association, told Chelsea Now.

Two weeks ago, in response to a March 14 letter in which the hotel’s board terminated the contract of BD Hotels, accusing the company of “default and willful misconduct,” hotel manager Glennon Travis vacated, and the company counter-sued for its $2.7 million “incentive fee.” Documents submitted by both sides appear to confirm longtime reports of mismanagement and inadequate maintenance at the landmark building—both before and after the ouster of former manager Stanley Bard.

The Chelsea Hotel has never been a stranger to drama, with its rock ’n’ roll reputation lately replaced by Chelsea’s surreal real estate dance. Last summer, Bard was cast out by a group of shareholders including Elder and attorney Marlene Krauss, who charged he had hired BD Hotels, the brainchild of boutique hoteliers Richard Born and Ira Drukier, to “restore the hotel to its former glory.”

According to tenants, a host of changes followed, including the hiring of the 27-year-old Travis, slashing of nightly room rates, collection letters with threats of eviction to permanent tenants, and reported sluggishness in responding to tenants’ requests for room repairs.

“Did they cut corners?” asked Griffin, a tenant of the hotel for 15 years. “I’d say they cut pages.”

Meanwhile, in the wake of Bard’s ouster, tenants began to sue in housing court to get their rooms formally recognized as rent-stabilized by the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal. For the most part, they won. “The building is recognized by DHCR as rent-stabilized because of its age,” Griffin said. “But when Stanley was here, he ran things with a handshake.”

Famous for allowing the hotel’s artist tenants—which have included Patti Smith, Dee Dee Ramone and Arthur Miller—to let their rents lapse at fallow times, and occasionally accepting a painting in lieu of payment, Bard also didn’t raise the rents that often or by much. “But Stanley never registered the individual rooms and apartments with DHCR, so we’ve had to,” said longtime tenant (and Chelsea Now contributor) Ed Hamilton, author of the blog Living With Legends.

Hamilton told Chelsea Now that BD has conceded many tenants’ claims to rent-stabilized status in court, “just to get them into the system,” he said. “Meanwhile, he was trying to get the rooms up to code.”

Not until all the room were “legal,” Hamilton claimed, did BD feel empowered to employ strategies commonly used by building owners elsewhere to empty apartments of undesired tenants, such as extensive “improvements” that would legally justify hiking the rent. But according to documents obtained by Chelsea Now, the hotel’s board claims that not even basic repairs were done, while BD charges that the board failed to supply enough funds to get the job done.

On March 14, a “Notice of Default and Willful Misconduct” was delivered to BD by attorneys for the Chelsea Hotel’s board, with a list of commitments on which the “manager” had allegedly failed to deliver. These included hiring Travis instead of a more experienced manager; following neither “generally accepted accounting procedures” or even a business plan; failing to help them obtain a mortgage on the building; and failing to improve the condition of the rooms. “Eight hotel rooms are unfit to rent,” the notice stated, “and forty have been classified in ‘horrible’ condition.”

In their March 21 response, attorneys for BD first reminded the board that “when BD Hotels took over the management of the hotel, it first had to remove the prior manager, Stanley Bard, who is a member of your clients’ family...” Moreover, the letter continued, Elder and others interfered with its efforts to create a new bookkeeping system; there were numerous, costly problems such as asbestos; and the board had refused to apply for a certificate of non-harassment from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which would be necessary for any renovations. BD also stated that that since last July, its management had increased net operating income of the hotel by 225 percent and revenue per available room by more than 35 percent.

While BD has since dropped their demands for reinstatement, litigation over that $2.7 million “incentive fee” continues.

The dispute “raises numerous questions, and each will have to be looked at in depth,” Griffin said. “But right now, I’m mostly concerned about the safety of my fellow tenants.”

The clash at last week’s anniversary exhibition came between Elder and tenant Arthur Nash, who had a week earlier won his suit in housing court. (Nash is also famous for hanging a banner from his second-floor windows, reading, “Bring Back the Bards.”)

Troeller’s inclusion of Elder as a co-curator has been a source of contention, she told Chelsea Now, and a possible source of the stink bomb, followed by a tenant in a mask pouring water on Elder from an upper-floor balcony.

That Monday, Hamilton said, two newly hired security men confronted Nash. “[When] Nash attempted to take the guard’s picture… the guard tried to wrench the camera away from Nash and then grabbed him in a bear hug and body slammed him against the front desk, smashing the camera—and Nash’s hand—against the counter repeatedly until the batteries flew out. The guard continued to wrestle with Nash as Nash tried to use the house phone to call the police.” No charges were filed, Hamilton added, “because the front desk employees wouldn’t confirm that it happened. I think they’re scared to.”

Those dark-uniformed men hired by Elder, who reportedly told tenants they were from a company called Perfect Security, accompanied him consistently throughout April.

“I work in the entertainment world, I’m not unfamiliar with security men,” Griffin said. “These weren’t security—these were goons, specifically meant to intimidate.”

By Thursday the Perfect Security men had left the hotel, Griffin and Hamilton confirmed. Tenants added that while they feel vindicated by the ouster of BD, there’s deep uncertainty about what the board will do next. “It’s clear that BD didn’t share the vision of the hotel,” Troeller said. “For so many years, we had leadership that made this place somewhere that welcomed artists, so much so that when Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in the 1980s, they only knew one thing—the Chelsea Hotel!” Now, she said, “We don’t know what it will be like.”

Troeller added that the hotel’s new direction might take a page from the Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Embassy, the 75-year-old hostel in Amsterdam now turned boutique hotel, called by Guardian UK “a riot of creativity” that showcases top Dutch designers such as Marcel Wanders and Jurgen Bey. “That owner turned the first floor into a gallery,” Troeller said. “You can do a lot, if you have vision.” But others, like Hamilton and Griffin, have a simpler solution.

“Bring back the Bards,” Griffin said, “before the hotel burns down!”