FOREWORD [excerpt] GABY HOFFMANN AND ALEX AUDER GABY: So some people are doing a book about residents at the Chelsea who are still living there through the construction and they asked me to write the foreword. I was just gonna say no cause I can hardly find time to write an email these days or how about a dream? Or that thing Rosy said about being brave and what it felt like when Lewis clapped with glee after Chris beatboxed for Rosy''s dark disco tooth brushing session last night and if I''m gonna write anything do I wanna write the foreword to someone else''s book about how bohemian the bohemians are and how cool it is that I was raised by an artist bohemian enough to live in the mecca of bohemianism and what a loss and oh the city and all those hideous chase banks and what about that old bum on the stoop I would chat with every day while eating my soggy éclair from the corner donut shop that is now a Starbucks before I would go home to rollerblade down the halls and drop eggs off the balcony and--oh yeah they love it--step over that syringe in the back stairway while running upstairs to eat chicken and broccoli with Ruth and family cause mom "just can''t take it anymore"--you know living on the postage stamp. And ahh those were the days and the fucking rich blah blah blah and if I''m gonna finally write about it all I will do it for my own book, film, or play, or eulogy, and then I thought you should do it cause you''ve already written so much and it''s so good and then I thought I could interview you and then I thought we could just write emails like this one in the 5 minutes before the baby wakes. And then I would convince them that they''re bohemian enough to let this be the foreword. What do you think? Ah there''s that baby! xo ALEX: You and I are forever bonded by our dead sibling, the Chelsea Hotel. We two are the rare few who really and truly grew up in the Chelsea Hotel and it takes a lot of intentional looking the other way when I hear about Chelsea stories from rich people who moved there in the 2000s because they CHOSE to live a "bohemian" lifestyle. As an adult, I had to give yoga classes to some of these characters IN the Chelsea Hotel, which I could no longer afford to live in even if I had wanted to, and finally I was forced out of NY altogether. That''s the hard thing to explain.

We didn''t choose the Chelsea Hotel. We ended up there because Stanley didn''t ask for a deposit or a lease. Mom always wanted to move out of our "postage stamp" of an apartment, but she just couldn''t get it together for all of the reasons that drew her to the Chelsea in the first place. Yeah, we don''t want to sound like bitter expats . and yet . we do have this love story to share. I loved the Chelsea so much. I loved waiting for you to come home to our little apartment the night you were born.

Now that I''m 48 and raising my kids in this neoliberal, helicopter-parenting world, I so often dig back into the memory banks to relive the freedom and community and uncanny surprises that waited for us in that lobby. I go through a somatic journey: through the lobby-I-know like-the-back-of-my-hand, sneak into the sinister El Quijote bathrooms to tend to my recurring bloody nose, up to the first floor elevators if I don''t feel like talking to Merle, and while I wait for the gold elevator I spit into the first-floor stairwell to see how it differed from spitting from the 7th floor. Okay I gotta go . love you. GABY: I was thinking about all the things I dropped from the 7th floor hallway down into that stairwell mouth that we treated as an incidental abyss, consequenceless, but was the foundation of our whole world--sucked candy, a note to no one, the spinach I didn''t want to eat and yes a spittoon full of saliva. I love thinking about the El Quijote bathroom. Almost impossibly making it through the lobby before Stanley caught me to ask for rent or Bonnie barked my name from her station behind the front desk with a message from someone that I really don''t want to get and then pushing through that heavy door into the musty gray entrance to the grand stairwell but then, instead of rising up into the sunlit center of it all, I move through that second set of doors into the dim romance of the restaurant and before anyone sees, slip into the warm, womblike, pink (pink right? I remember it feeling baroque, sort of parlor-esque from another era in Russia maybe) safe space, but I don''t linger lest the waiters start to get aggressive. Ah Merle, now it seems so fun to get caught in the elevator with Merle doesn''t it? Did you know that for the longest time I thought we had a portrait of Lee, her husband, in our apt.

and one day I told him so and he was shocked. "Yeah, you''re smoking a cigar and it''s on our mantel." "Your mantel?! I don''t think so." When I saw mom and told her Lee didn''t know we had a painting of him on our wall she laughed hysterically--"That''s Castro!!!" Even though I was all but 8 I was ashamed--I should have known. I always say it was the ideal place to grow up in NYC as it essentially operated like a suburban cul-de-sac with all that freedom and community for kids. When Rosy goes down to Nancy''s apartment to rewrite a page in Frog and Toad are Friends because it failed to explain where that button went and Nancy expertly adds a drawing of Toad slipping it into his pocket or when she asks me to leave her on the stoop with Jay and Niko while they drink beer and chain smoke so she can "chat with her friends alone," I feel like we''ve magically eked out a little of what we loved about growing up in the Chelsea. Fuck! Alternate side parking. love Xx PHOTOGRAPHER''S NOTE COLIN MILLER In 2015 an architecture firm approached me to take some photographs of the renovations they''d made to the historic Hotel Chelsea after the building was sold out from under its longtime owner and manager Stanley Bard.

What I found was that many of the hotel''s original features had already been lost in the demolition of large swathes of the building. The Chelsea''s ornate and beautiful red brick facade concealed the destruction that was taking place within the hotel. The photographs I made were forgettable, but when I looked down the iconic wrought iron staircase I saw something of the hotel''s former glory. Several pieces of the tenants'' artwork decorated the stairwell and amid the construction mess were visible signs of a vibrant community of residents who cared deeply for their home. I had only a vague sense of the Chelsea then, primarily through the film Sid and Nancy and from living in New York on the edge of the punk scene. But I had friends who had a great appreciation for the hotel. I had actually been there once before: in the early 2000s, in my first years in New York City, I was invited to a birthday party at the Chelsea. My friend had rented a corner suite and invited his band and other friends (I''d been shooting the band for one of my first college projects, a kind of rite of passage for a young photographer) and at the hotel I drank and smoked and took pictures of my friends drinking and smoking.

Like many before and after us, we''d gone to the Chelsea to capture something of the rock stars stumbling through the hallways and making music until the sun came up. For many decades, an aura of fame and creativity emanated from the hotel. Struck by what I had seen during my architectural shoot at the Chelsea, I set out to get a full and complete look at it, to photograph the homes of the last remaining residents before they were renovated and the historic units were further sterilized. At that time the word was out that the Chelsea''s demise was imminent; I had precious few months before it would all disappear. I started to learn more about the Chelsea and read books about its history. I brought on friend and documentarian Ray Mock to write and collaborate on the project. Though I wouldn''t connect the dots until later, he was a member of the band I had shot some fifteen years earlier on the night I was first introduced to the Chelsea. A sympathetic architect connected me with several of the residents and I began sending them letters with samples of my work.

I sent pictures of monasteries and temples I had recently shot in Western Sichuan, China, seeing those photos as somehow akin to the kind of bohemian sanctuaries I expected to find at the hotel. I wasn''t wrong. I met Tony Notarberardino for the first time in 2015 and entering his apartment was like crossing into another dimension. In his living room, lit by dozens of candles, my wife and I were rapt as he told us about his life in the hotel and about the wild parties he''d thrown in his space. An absinthe decanter sat on the table and a large Buddha stood framed in an arched nook. His bedroom was painted in deep reds and ochers and decorated as a kind of burlesque netherworld. When we stepped from the hotel onto Twenty-Third Street it truly felt like we were reentering the normal plane of existence; the sounds of traffic suddenly returned and we found ourselves back in the real world. But Tony''s home had created a distinct and powerful shift in my perception of the hotel and I began to form a deeper understanding of the worlds people carved out there: his apartment was not only an extension of his personality but a collection of the lives of those who had lived there before him.

It was Australian artist Vali Myers who had painted the bedroom, which was later occupied by Dee Dee Ramone and his young wife, Barbara. The Chelsea is a collaboration across time, an accumulation of the arks so many have made on it. At least until now. The renovation of the Chelsea has progressed slowly, very slowly. My initial concern about a quick reopening of the hotel was unfounded as the months stretched to four years. In the intervening time it has changed ow.