We lived in the divey Gramercy Park Hotel for two months when it had the great dim bar with the Goldfish crackers and Citronella candles and ancient red jacketed waiters. Then there were the old people who lived in wallpaper-peeling monthly apartments with blaring TV's and awful catfood smells. One would encounter them unexpectedly, like Jack Nicholson's ghouls in The Overlook. I bet somebody does this sort of hatchet job on the Chelsea Hotel next...
"The Gramercy Park was designed by the artist Julian Schnabel with rich baroque colors, voluptuous forms and show-stopping contemporary art. When you walk in past the graceful brownstones of leafy Gramercy Park, you see an enormous Cy Twombly painting to the right, a Richard Prince to the left, and a magnificent Aubusson carpet hand-woven to Schnabel's design in deep reds, blues and pinks."
Link: A comeback, and a new luxe - Style - International Herald Tribune.
You know we're going to wind up staying in the renovated one, too, such are our internal contradictions and lapses of taste. But after all, a Staircase heads both up and down, mes amis.
Glad to hear that Richard Prince has made it to the status lobby art, too. Are the Baby Boomers and their last-minute Nixon nostalgia dead yet? And yet I love the combined Schrager/Schnabel ego, which must be breaking records all over Manhattan.
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