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Stanley Bard

Owner of the Chelsea Hotel, the epicentre of New York bohemia described by a resident as less of a hotel, more of a ‘human menagerie’

February 16 2017, 12:00pm, The Times

Bard at the Chelsea Hotel in 2006, where the lobby was adorned with artworkEYEVINE

If you had told Stanley Bard that he was running a commercial business during the 40 years he was the proprietor of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, he would have been mortally offended.

To Bard, the Chelsea was not a conventional hotel or a block of apartments for let, but a “community”, a bohemian enclave in the heart of Manhattan where he gave sanctuary to several generations of left-field artists, rock stars, famous writers, eccentrics, oddballs and ne’er-do-wells. When he described the demi-monde that he encouraged to flourish inside the imposing 12-storey, 250-room gothic edifice on West 23rd Street as “strange and kooky”, it was not intended as an admission of the Chelsea’s shabbiness — it was a proudly defiant boast.