Free Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Page A

filmmaker Harry Smith wiggled his way around a room bursting with his collections of Ukrainian Easter eggs and Seminole dresses. Depending on your theory of what happened in Room 100, Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen here, or Nancy killed herself, or somebody broke in and killed Nancy, leaving Sid to take the blame. Bob Dylan was here in the mid-’60s, around his Blonde on Blonde heyday, flirting with Edie Sedgwick, whose amphetamines and pearls he may or may not have been singing about in “Just Like a Woman.” And thanks to Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death here, and Sedgwick, the It-Girl-turned-burn-victim who set her room on fire, it is the only hotel I can think of where people unfamiliar with New York know the name of the nearest hospital—St. Vincent’s—because the phrase “rushed to St. Vincent’s” tends to pop up in Chelsea lore.
    At the Chelsea, famous and infamous are often confused, as are eccentricity and crime. The anything-goes atmosphere isn’t without its hazards. Arthur Miller, one of the great moralists of the American century, spent much of the ’60s living here, attending what he calls the “ceaseless Chelsea party.” In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller describes walking into the lobby back then and encountering an agitated young woman handing out leaflets which outlined her ambition to shoot a man, any man. He writes, “I said to the management that this woman was going to kill somebody and maybe something ought to bedone about her before she exploded, but she was a member of the party, it seemed, and it wouldn’t do to be too square about it.” Which was too bad for a certain Pope of Pop; the woman turned out to be Valerie Solanas, and she shot a man (sort of) named Andy Warhol in 1968.
    The Chelsea seems to attract all the best people—the best painters, the best singers, the best killers. Its appeal is a mystery. For who knows what lies in the heart of a place—a few rooms in a fairly crummy part of town—that became a beacon to so many tattered troubadours. Any old youth hostel could harbor penniless punks. But composer Virgil Thomson, too? And Arthur Miller, he of the Pulitzer prize? What gives?
    Though the Chelsea’s rep is that of a dorm of the dispossessed, it is a hotel, with rooms and reservations and check-ins and everything. I show up on the Fourth of July as an Arthur Miller joke. As Miller wrote about the hotel, “It was not part of America, had no vacuum cleaners, no rules, no taste, no shame.” True to form, on our national holiday, it has no red, no white, no blue. That night, as I return from watching fireworks around midnight, I make some quip to a man who lives on my floor like, “Well, well, another year for our nation.” He says, “For your nation maybe. Me, I celebrate Canada Day.” It was the sort of treasonous claptrap I should have expected from this embassy of insurgents.
    Such are the random encounters of the Chelsea Hotel: One minute you’re bathing in the aura of Dylan Thomas, the next minute you’redrowning in sticky goo. One afternoon a friend and I are sitting in the lobby. A woman who lives in the hotel sits in a chair next to us. She proceeds to transport the contents of a cup of lemonade into a bottle, the reverse of the standard bottle-to-cup operating procedure. Of course lemonade and ice spill everywhere, all over the floor, all over the table next to us. When she catches us staring at her mess, she justifies it, harping, “You think this is a mess? New York is a mess! Why should it matter if I spill anything inside? The whole city is a dump! I’m not pretending the inside is any different than the outside anymore!”
    Away from the lobby’s camaraderie, the Chelsea’s public gang-ways—the elevators, the stairwell, the halls—are among the creepiest psychic spaces in town. I didn’t want to let down my guard, let