What I Love - A Lounge of Her Own Beatrice de Gea for The New York Times Susanne Bartsch, the party promoter, reclines on one of her favorite things in her overstuffed apartment, a Chinese bed. IN the "70s and "80s, thousands of would-be artists and as-yet-unknowns swept into New York City with fantasies of making it big. Susanne Bartsch, the Swiss party hostess who is now known for her outrageous get-ups and association with the drag scene here, wasn't quite one of them. She first visited New York in 1977 to go to Studio 54, and wasn't all that enthralled. "New York was really run-down," Ms. Bartsch said recently. She was sheathed in a see-through Jean Paul Gaultier gown, and a makeup and hair crew were prepping her for the party she was hosting at Le Bain, a nightclub at the Standard Hotel in the meatpacking district. I was wearing all this jewelry. It wasn't really gold, but it looked like gold, and I had to take it on and off. I went inside, I put it all on. I went outside, I took it all off. It was a nightmare. Because there were a lot of muggings. The streets had big holes in them. It was crazy. But then, in the early "80s, love changed her mind. The object of her affection was an artist named Patrick Hughes, and Ms. Bartsch followed him right to the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, where the romance soon went south. "He went back to London and I stayed," she said. I came to New York for love and I fell in love with New York. In no small part, this is because of the home she has made for herself in an apartment at the Chelsea, long noted for being shabby-cool and overrun with artists, writers and rockers. Ms. Bartsch loves the location. "This is very glam," she said. It's very me. It suits what she calls the "Bartsch-land" brand. "It's close to everything," she added. You're uptown, downtown and everywhere quickly. And of course, she never has to give anybody her address, because in the world she inhabits everybody knows where the Chelsea is. For a while Ms. Bartsch lived there by herself, and then she didn't. In 1992, a drag queen named the Baroness took her to a new neighborhood gym, where Ms. Bartsch met its owner and her future husband, David Barton, a 5-foot-5 bodybuilder with pecs nearly as wide as a city block. Two years later, they brought a son, Bailey, home to the Chelsea and their rotating cast of cats and dogs. As for the wedding, a wild event at the Manhattan Center, Ms. Bartsch wore a Thierry Mugler flesh-colored bodysuit, Mr. Barton a flesh-tone G-string. There were 43 bridesmaids of both the male and female variety. A picture of the nuptials sits on the mantelpiece in the living room. Ms. Bartsch's favorite things in the overstuffed apartment are two Chinese beds, one of which sits in the living room, the other in the bedroom down the hall. "The one in the bedroom I got at an auction house on 24th Street," she said. Nobody had bought it because there were problems with the fit or something. So I got it for like $400. Which was a great buy. I love that it's like an apartment within the apartment. In recent years, Mr. Barton moved out and Bailey went to college at Brown, but the woman of the house has no plans to downsize. Not even a feud between the hotel's new management, which is renovating the building, and many of the residents (they've been in and out of court) has dampened her enthusiasm for the place. "It's exciting," Ms. Bartsch said. I like that they're fixing it up, and it looks like they're keeping things according to what's appropriate. The owners like the place, they love the hotel, so I think they're going to do what they need to do to keep it within its character, which is good. Really, there's nowhere else she'd like to live, unless someone wanted to give her a private plane. It's not the money or the opulence that makes that fantasy so attractive, she explained. Rather, it's the ability to go anywhere and everywhere, whenever she pleases. "In a way, living in a hotel has that same sort of feeling," Ms. Bartsch said. That you're not permanent. You can come and go. And I like that idea, even though I don't really come and go.