Ed Hamilton wrote Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca (DeCapo Press, 2007), one of my favorite books in quite some time, the perfect compendium of secret histories and New York noir happening inside one of the city’s most haunting landmarks. I was swept away by the stories, and by his prose, feeling transported into another world, a nether world, a place filled with the curious and curiouser.
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Hamilton has returned to his beloved city with a new book, The Chintz Age (Cervena Barva Press), a collection of seven stories and a novella that brings us into the hear and now. Everything is gentrifying at an eerily rapid pace, and the old school is being pushed out, rubbed out, and erased. Hamilton’s new book brings back the great characters of old York, the punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists that made this city legendary. Give it up for Ed Hamilton!
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Miss Rosen: So much of New York has changed radically in the past two decades. I count the Disney Story in Times Square as the harbinger of the 21st century capitalism that has changed the fabric of the city so radically. Please talk about how the changes to the city gave birth to The Chintz Age?
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Ed Hamilton: There once was a place for everybody in the city, for all types of people from every social class—artists, activists, club kids, rappers, squatters, immigrants, bums, even stockbrokers—that’s what made NYC so great. There was also such a thing as tolerance. You might not like all these different sorts of people, but nobody was forcing you to go where they lived or worked. Everybody knew that the strippers and the hookers lurked in Times Square, and if that sort of thing offended you, you could easily just avoid the area. But then somebody (developers, promoters of tourism, with Giuliani as their hit man) decided there was money to be made by a bit of social engineering, and so they set out to remake NYC in their own narrow minded suburban image.
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The first to go were (no surprise here) the least powerful; and no one complained much when a handful of sex workers and pornographers were harassed and driven out of town. (This backfired a bit, by the way: now the sex shops are more dispersed, with some of them in very upscale neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Chelsea.) No one complained too much when Giuliani virtually criminalized the homeless, either.
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After that, there was no stopping the tide: we had policies designed to kick the poor out of their projects (they proved more resilient than perhaps expected, and the latest idea, backed by DeBlasio, is to take away their green space and build right over the top of them); then the working and middle classes were targeted; and now even the upper middle class and rich (outside the 1% of speculators and oil millionaires) are finding it hard to afford a decent place in the city (and increasingly boring and not worth it anyway if they have to eat at Olive Garden and shop at 7-11).
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My wife, Debbie, and I came to the city in 1995, so the change was already well under way—and, though we deplored the gentrification, we were probably a part of it, in a way. My first book, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, chronicles the relatively gentle, gradual gentrification of the hotel we’ve lived in for twenty years. But that pales in comparison to the hyper-gentrification that has swept the city in the past few years (and which I think is coming to be seen as in almost nobody’s interest). When developers took over the Chelsea in 2007, ousting the Bard family who had run the hotel for 60 years, Debbie and I, together with a handful of other tenants, decided to resist the takeover. We won many battles, but ultimately lost the war: about seventy tenants (virtually all of them people in the arts) were ultimately evicted, and much of the historic hotel has been gutted.
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The New Yorkers you describe, their world views and way of life, now seem so long ago and so far away, showing how quickly New York can change. Can you talk about what your characters all share that makes them New Yorkers of the old school?
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New York, of course, is a city of transplants, as most of its residents seem to come from elsewhere. My characters are, for the most part, regular, middle class people who have fled the suburbs (which should be understood less as an actual place than as a state of mind, or perhaps as a symbol of the boring, the mundane), seeking something better. They are all involved in creative fields, and share a sense of idealism and possibility. They feel like they are part of a larger whole, and are carrying on a tradition that is more important that their individual selves.
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For Dave, in the story “Fat Hippie Books,” this tradition is defined in terms of Bohemianism, a life lived in service to art and humanity, rather than strictly for the pursuit of money and comfort; for Martha, in the title story, it’s a somewhat different tradition of struggle, activism, and resistance to oppression. These are characters that are proud to be New Yorkers; they feel that it gives them an aura of toughness and uniqueness that sets them apart from those who were satisfied with a desk job in the office park and a two-car garage. And I think, also, that they share a sense that they are just borrowing the city, leasing it on a temporary basis to inspire their art and to reinvent themselves. They are under no misconceptions that they own the city, or can defeat it. But they do want to leave it (at least a little bit) better than when they found it. They share a deep respect for those who went before them as artists and activists in New York, as well as an almost paternal concern for who will follow in their footsteps. They feel like they are caretakers of the city, nurturing and passing on a grand tradition that they hope will outlive them, and perhaps even live forever.
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The tough part of this question is what makes these relative “old-timers” (really just slightly weary, though still energetic middle aged people) different from the newer sort of New Yorkers. That question is central to The Chintz Age, as many of my characters struggle with that question as well. And I’m not talking about the sort of sociopathic developers and speculators who run roughshod over everything; they’ve always been around, and it’s just that politicians have given them free rein lately. I’m more interested in the type of New Yorker made possible by the real estate boom, what Jeremiah Moss, on his blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York calls “Yunnies” or young urban narcissists. You know the type: be they hipsters with their noses buried in their I-phones, or rampaging soccer moms pushing double-wide strollers, they’ll take you out without batting an eyelash—because, in fact, they don’t even see you, and you don’t even exist for them. Theo, in “Plagiarism” has an encounter with this type of person, somebody whose smug, me-first attitude allows her to steal, without compunction, another writer’s work. What flabbergasts Theo the most is that Kristabelle Tweed, a fellow writer, after all, doesn’t even give a thought to her own artistic integrity, but is so self-involved that all that’s important is success and the glorification of herself by whatever means.
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But were prior generations really any different from the new people? The older folk were ambitious too, that’s for sure, and they stepped on people as well, especially the successful ones. Maybe the Yunnies just have their own ways of doing things. So I’m afraid I don’t have a definitive answer to this question (and none of my characters do either, and that’s a part of their existential dilemma). When I’m in a charitable mood, I would like to give the newcomers the benefit of the doubt, and I try to explore their concerns with several of the younger characters in my book. A notable example is the young self-involved writer, James McKinley, in “Highline/Highlife,” whose attempt to make himself a master of the literary universe—elevating himself, Godlike, over the city in his glass-and-steel tower, but mostly in his vivid imagination—backfires disastrously, as he succumbs to paranoia and jealousy.
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Legends of the Chelsea Hotel was one of my favorite books of 2007. I’m so inspired to go back and read it again. The Chintz Age is a wonderful follow up volume to that book. I love how your work reminds me of the phrase, “8 millions stories in the naked city.” Can you speak to how these two books inform each other about the changing face of New York?
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While I tried to make the stories in Legends as grittily realistic as possible, there is a romantic element to most of them as well (which is part of what I meant by calling the stories and the people “legends”). Even as I document the downfalls of junkies and prostitutes and self-destructive artists, I am also, in a way, celebrating their lives, saying that maybe it’s better to burn the candle at both ends than simply to punch the clock until you finally check out. This duality led to some interesting comments from my fellow residents: on the one hand I had people chastising me for promoting the a return to the bad ol’ pre-gentrification hotel (“I lived here in those days, and sometimes I was scared to go into the hallway,” one man told me), while other critics damned me for demonizing drug users (“Junkies are people, too, you know”).
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I’ve continued this tradition, but perhaps taken it even more into the romantic, legendary direction—The Chintz Age is, after all, fiction, so I have a bit more leeway. I describe the stories on the back of the book as “grittily realistic fairy tales,” and while “fairy tales” may be the wrong word (it almost certainly is, as it implies a supernatural element), and I while thought about using “myths” or “folk tales” or even “legends” once again, what I wanted to express was that, even in certain rather grim situations, where the challenges of a hard core deterministic, materialistic city daunt and overwhelm us, grinding us to bits, there is still the possibility of transcendence and redemption—both for my characters, and, hopefully, for myself.
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Celebrated the Release of The Chintz Age
December 1, 2015 at 7:00 pm
powerHouse Arena, BK
