Stanley Bard, who ran Chelsea Hotel as bohemian sanctuary . By Sam
Roberts New York Times . NEW YORK - Stanley Bard, a Robin Hood of
innkeepers who nurtured talented writers and artists and tolerated
assorted deadbeats as the manager and part-owner of the Chelsea Hotel
in Manhattan for more than 40 years, died Tuesday in Boca Raton, Fla.
He was 82. The cause was a stroke, his son, David, said. The Chelsea, a
venerable 12-story Victorian Gothic structure on West 23rd Street, was
already a New York cultural landmark with a reputation as a bohemian
sanctuary when Mr. Bard's father, David, bought an ownership stake in
it in 1947. (Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe, among others, had stayed
there.) Stanley Bard began working there in 1957 as a plumber's
assistant with a college degree. When his father died in 1964, Mr. Bard
took over as manager and began running the hotel with a studied
obliviousness until he was forced out in a power struggle in 2007. "The
most beloved - and enigmatic - character ever to grace the halls of the
Chelsea is, of course, our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard," Ed
Hamilton, a tenant, wrote in "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living With
Artists and Outlaws in New York's Rebel Mecca" (2007). "Among his many
endearing qualities, Stanley possesses a congenital inability to admit
that anything bad has ever taken place in the hotel. His positivism
bordered on the pathological. "Early in the book," Jeff Giles wrote of
"Legends of the Chelsea Hotel" in The New York Times Book Review,
"Hamilton passes along a former tenant's story of seeing a swarm of
policemen on the ninth floor and assuming that Joe the junkie had
finally OD'd. Bard corrected him: The police officers were in fact
guests at the hotel, and the junkie was vacationing abroad. The tenant,
it seems, had been misled by the stretcher, the corpse, and the body
bag. The filmmaker Milos Forman, appearing in Abel Ferrara's 2008
documentary "Chelsea on the Rocks," teasingly asked Stanley Bard on
camera whether any guest had ever died at his hotel. Mr. Bard cited
just one, in 1988: the portrait painter Alphaeus Cole, who lived to be
112. He neglected to mention, among others, Dylan Thomas, who drank
himself to death and was rushed to a hospital emergency room from the
hotel in 1953, or Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious of the
Sex Pistols, who was stabbed to death in their room in 1978. (He was
charged with her murder but died of a heroin overdose while free on
bail in 1979 before the case went to trial.) While Mr. Bard presided
over it, the Chelsea was also home to Viva, the Andy Warhol film star;
the artists Larry Rivers, Christo, and Jeanne-Claude (Christo wrapped
Jeanne-Claude, his wife, there); the singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell
and Leonard Cohen (who wrote a song about it, "Chelsea Hotel #2"); and
the punk rock musician Dee Dee Ramone (who caricatured Mr. Bard in a
horror novel he wrote). The Chelsea was where Jack Kerouac worked on
"On the Road," where Arthur C. Clarke wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
where William Burroughs wrote "Naked Lunch," and where Bob Dylan wrote
"Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Mr. Bard lent long-term tenants money
and tolerated their overdue bills; he embraced their eccentricities and
encouraged their cultural ambitions. When Timur Cimkentli, a
photographer, owed back rent, Mr. Bard hired him as a bellman.
Cimkentli told NPR in 2011 that Mr. Bard "was kind of like a huge leaf
that kids could go under away from the storm, and that was the rarity
of this hotel, that he would keep you on, he would see you, and you
would owe him two months' rent and you would cry to him and he would
say, 'Don't worry, keep painting, keep painting.' Arthur Miller, who
wrote his play "After the Fall" there, recalled in the literary
magazine Granta in 2002 that when he moved into the Chelsea in 1960, "I
did not know quite what to make of Mr. Bard. "A blue-eyed Hungarian
Jew," Miller continued, "short and with a rather clear, delighted round
face, full of energy, he waved a hand over the room saying: 'Everything
is perfect. All the furniture is brand new, new mattresses, drapes.
Look in the bathroom. "As we walked to the bathroom, I noticed a worn
path down the middle of the carpet and what felt like coal dust
crunching under my shoes. 'The carpet,' I started to say, but he cut me
off. 'A new carpet is coming tomorrow,' he said with raised index
finger, and one knew he had not thought of replacing the carpet until
that very minute. Mr. Bard, Miller wrote, had a "talent for overriding
probability, an emotional fluency which sent his thoughts on swallow
loops from subject to subject, a progressive, enthusiastic view of
life. "In a word, anarchy. Mr. Bard was replaced as the Chelsea's
managing partner in 2007 by descendants of the other original
investors. The hotel was subsequently sold. He retired to Florida in
2009.
