the view from the inside

On June 18, 2007, 72-year-old Stanley Bard was ousted from his position as the managing partner of the Hotel Chelsea, better known in bohemian lore as the Chelsea Hotel. It was over the course of Bard's half-century tenure that the Chelsea became legendary, a true north for artists and outcasts that played host to everyone from "2001: A Space Odyssey" author Arthur C. Clarke to doomed lovers Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious. The Chelsea's past is well knownit has inspired countless songs and not a few films. With BD Hotels NY, LLC, now at the helm, however, the hotel's future is decidedly unwritten. Current resident Julia Calfee steps into the breach with her newly released book of photographs, "Inside: The Chelsea Hotel" (powerhouse), a portrait of the hotel's present. Shot in grainy black and white, the subjects smothered in shadow, "Inside" conjures at once the Chelsea mystique, the shabby glamour of the place itself, and Calfee's own sense of her long-term temporary home as a kind of spider's web, deadly to the wrong fly.



podcasts