Creepy or cozy?

We are as fond of baby animals and those brightly-colored mini food erasers as much as the next person. But our affections are decidedly more muted when it comes to small hotel rooms. Certainly there's something cute about the teensy spaces, but it's one of those you-won’t-know-until-you-try-it kind of things. And we're not sure that we want to try it.

That said, tourists will have more opportunities than ever before. BD Hotels, the developer responsible for opening the first tiny hotel (or pod—if you want to put a positive spin on it) in Manhattan in 2007, is opening up a new location in Murray Hill, reports The New York Times. The 366-room hotel, Pod 39, will be slightly larger than its Midtown East sibling, Pod Hotel, and it will have more amenities.

“When we built the original Pod Hotel, we had a nice communal lobby and garden, but we realized it was just too small for the capacity,” Richard Born, a principle of BD Hotels told The Times. “In every corner was somebody sitting cross-legged with a backpack and laptop.”

Perhaps residents found their rooms too small?

Pod 39, however, will have about 4,500 square-feet of communal space, Mr. Born said, and will include a lobby, marquee, ground-floor restaurant, and a lounge with a bar, library, pool table, tennis table, and a fireplace.

“We’ve learned that our customer really wants to be out of their room in a public environment with other hotel guests,” he added.

Inn-deed!

Mr. Born told The Times that one of the reasons why they chose Pod 39’s location was for its size. The new hotel, which has 17 stories and includes a rooftop garden, is located in a former Allerton club hotel that still has its original Italian Renaissance style façade.

The new hotel will have other perks, like private bathrooms for every room (the Pod Hotel has some rooms with shared bathrooms), and more rooms with two single beds and bunk beds. But the hotel’s main draw, of course, is the price. With rates going at $100 to $200 a night, guests almost won't mind pretzeling themselves into their chambers.

jschiewe@observer.com

The fancy Tribeca lodge is geared toward people who value their privacy, like Mr. De Niro himself. It's supposed to be a quiet retreat where guys like Patrick Dempsey can lift weights in peace and where the rapper Eminem can safely avoid eye contact with other humans, entirely.

Good thing. The celebrity-friendly inn is operating at only an "estimated 50% occupancy rate," the hotel's "grimacing" lawyer informed the local community board this week, according to Eater. ("That grimacing 'lawyer' was [Greenwich co-owner] Richard [Born]," Ira Drukier, one of Mr. De Niro's partners, clarified in an email to The Observer.)

The place seemed almost too peaceful when I last visited the intricately designed hotel one afternoon this past November. I spotted only two guests chatting in a room off the lobby before a guy resembling the actor Kevin Spacey wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball cap darted from an elevator and out the door.

While a half-empty hotel might suit Mr. De Niro's sensibilities, other hoteliers are likely not thrilled by the overall downward trend in bookings.

Industry analyst John A. Fox, senior vice president at PKF Consulting, said preliminary figures at hotels in Manhattan last month indicate "the lowest occupancy for a January since 1994" with revenues down about 30 percent from January 2008.

And it only gets worse in February: "I have seen data that indicates that for the week ended Feb. 7, citywide occupancy was about 56% and that for the same week hotel room revenues were down about 44% from the same week in 2008," Mr. Fox told The Observer via email.

About a dozen plainly dressed protesters had lined up outside the fashionable West Village celebrity haunt rather inconveniently around dinner time, wielding placards blasting the trendy eatery’s owners: “Graydon Carter’s partner Sean MacPherson is a Slumlord!”

They were not complaining about a bad seating arrangement somewhere in the back of the see-and-be-seen destination.

The demonstrators were all tenants of the dowdy old Hotel Riverview, located a few blocks away at 113 Jane Street, and all struggling against the forces of change.

Last January, the five-story, 211-room William Boring-designed brick landmark hotel—which once sheltered survivors of the Titanic and has for years provided affordable, albeit far from gracious, accommodations, for down-and-out bohemians (around $200 per week!)—was sold for $27 million to a group of entrepreneurs more commonly associated with upscale properties.

Chief among them: the bicoastal hospitality impresario Mr. MacPherson, whose burgeoning portfolio includes not only the swank Waverly Inn and a number of restaurants in Los Angeles, but also the Bowery and Maritime hotels in Manhattan.

He and his partners quickly began the process of converting the shabby old rent-stabilized hotel into a hip hostel for thrifty tourists called the Jane. Just $99 a night, plus tax, for a 50-square-foot, nautical-themed cabin that rivals the size of the guest rooms in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; communal bathrooms down the hall. Whatta bargain!

Holdovers from the Hotel Riverview era claim to be getting the raw end of the deal. Eviction notices began arriving in short order. At least 10 current tenants are now facing homelessness, according to the busy docket at housing court.

Those who remain describe insufferable living conditions throughout the ongoing reconstruction effort, citing rodents, bedbugs, heating and plumbing problems, including “broken water pipes which caused cascading waters to flood the bathrooms, feces and other bodily discharges on the bathroom floors,” according to court papers.

Well-heeled patrons heading into the highfalutin Waverly Inn last Wednesday night were given a quick glimpse of what it’s like to stroll down hallways of exposed wires, containers of chemicals strewn about and lewd drawings scrawled on the walls.

“You show them the pictures and they’re horrified,” said Patricia Oltremare, a fourth-floor Jane resident and president of the Jane Street Hotel Tenants Association, who was carrying around a book of photos documenting the as-yet-unfinished hotel conversion at its ugliest points over the past year.

The actor Hugh Jackman, among others, stopped to take a look. He offered sympathy for the tenants’ plight but headed into the glitzy restaurant anyway.

It’s just the sort of sucks-to-be-you response that hotel tenants are used to.

Ms. Oltremare, for one, refused to pay rent for months, given all the noise, dust and debris as well as the tearing down and rebuilding of walls in empty guests room and hallways. A housing court judge briefly reduced her rent bill as a result and even tacked on an additional discount: “For the occasional bedbug problem, I find that the respondent is entitled to $175 as an abatement.”

That was back in September. At a meeting in her lawyer’s office last week, Ms. Oltremare rolled up her right pant leg to reveal a series of red welts, which she described as fresh bites.

For months, Ms. Oltremare and her neighbors have complained about their living conditions to various city agencies, registering more than 100 grievances with the departments of Buildings and Housing alone, but with little result, save for a few minor code violations. (Housing court records show the city has charges pending against the hotel for its apparent failure to provide hot running water on two separate occasions this past October, with possible fines ranging from $250 to $1,000.)

In August, the city granted the developers an all-important Certificate of No Harassment, allowing the controversial hotel conversion project to proceed as planned.

WALKING INTO THE heavily potpourri-scented hallways of the hotel’s partially finished floors this week, one is confronted with two starkly divergent cultures, marked by two different styles of doors—polished wooden doors with shiny brass handles for the transient newcomers, shabby gray doors for the clinging old-timers.

“Some of the female guests are appalled that there are male tenants running around in their underwear when they go to the bathrooms that everyone shares,” Ms. Oltremare noted. “Remember, they are guests and this is our home, so many of the tenants have done this for years.”

Yet, it seems blatantly obvious which group the new management prefers, she added; “They tell us, ‘Shhhhh, there’s guests.’”

Last week, aggrieved longtime dwellers decided to try a different tact, launching an aggressive media campaign with the help of publicist Ron Torossian and their lawyer, Edward Mermelstein, who is now suing both the hotel and the city on the tenants’ behalf.

“How is it possible that [the hotel’s owners] were able to obtain a Certificate of No Harassment when there were 15 affidavits sitting with the court-appointed attorney that apparently never made it into the record?” Mr. Mermelstein asked. “There was a clear history of harassment throughout this whole period before and after the certificate was issued.”

A hearing on the case is scheduled for Jan. 9.

After months of living in what they described as a virtual demilitarized zone—“I had a better time in the Army!” joked one hotel resident in a faded leather jacket and skull-and-bones cap—tenants were thrilled to finally be the ones making all the racket.

“Basically, they’ve been abused in the press over the last year and they’ve been abused personally in this building for such a long time that they’re getting excited that they can hit back a little bit,” Mr. Mermelstein said.

Rather than picket their own building, tucked away on a secluded side street, organizers opted to stake out Mr. MacPherson’s more prominent locations.

Outside the star-studded Waverly Inn, the attentive maitre d’ tried his best to the quiet the angry crowd. “Graydon is not here tonight,” he said, referring to Mr. Carter, the renowned editor of Vanity Fair and part-time restaurateur. “And Sean MacPherson’s not here, either.” But he offered to take a message. “Graydon is going to call you,” he said. “I don’t know if you want that.”

In fact, no one did. About that time, a police cruiser pulled up to the corner of Bank Street and Waverly Place to disburse the crowd.

At least one of the hotel’s partners did receive the message that evening.

“Hey, that’s me!” said developer Ira Drukier, one of Mr. MacPherson’s partners in the Jane, pointing to the protesters’ signs with a wide grin, as he headed into the restaurant. “What are they upset about?” Mr. Drukier asked. “It’s construction,” he said with a shrug.

In an earlier interview with The Observer, Mr. Drukier and fellow Jane partner Richard Born described the ongoing project as “a challenge,” but insisted that only residents who didn’t pay rent would be evicted. (The tenants’ attorney, Mr. Mermelstein, disputed this: “They’re playing games by not accepting rent and then serving the tenants right away with a nonpayment proceeding.”)

The pair seemed truly proud of the compact-room concept, noting that the linens in the Jane’s tiny refurbished cabins were of the same 400-thread count as those in the swanky Bowery Hotel’s spacious suites. “We call the Jane a micro-luxury,” Mr. Born said. “You have flat-screen TVs, wireless Internet, iPod docking station. The hardware is gorgeous brass.”

The stylish upgrades offer little comfort to existing tenants, who don’t have the luxury of simply switching to newer rooms. “Once you’ve moved, you lose your rights,” noted Mr. Mermelstein, the tenants’ attorney.

DESPITE BEING STUCK with subpar accommodations, some tenants plan to cling to their existing rooms as long as they can—if only to spite the new regime.

“I told Sean MacPherson, ‘I will pay every penny of my rent. To my last breath, I will get you. You are never going to do this to people again,’” said the tenacious Ms. Oltremare, making good on her threat last week by following up the Waverly Inn protests with pickets outside the Bowery Hotel on Thursday night and then back again at the Waverly the next night.

“I have nothing to do with the Jane Street hotel!” protested the Waverly Inn’s co-owner, Mr. Carter, when the demonstrators returned on Friday.

“We’re not saying you own it,” replied Ms. Oltremare, flipping through her construction photos for the Vanity Fair boss to see. “It’s your partner, Sean MacPherson.”

Mr. Carter offered to continue the conversation inside the restaurant, but Ms. Oltremare refused to cross the picket line.

She said the protesters would be back again on Tuesday night. And Wednesday night. “We like it here,” she said.

cshott@observer.com

He said his name was Eliot and that he worked at Fox News. “Dude, I just talked to Karl Rove on my fucking phone,” he shouted. “You think I’m fucking with you? Mike Huckabee called me, like, three hours ago. Dude, I’m the most brilliant of the brilliant.”

Mr. Brilliant was one of scores of freeloaders on hand for the second annual meatpacking district block party, sponsored by Details magazine, with nearly 50 neighborhood businesses, from Diane von Furstenberg to YOYAMART, offering discounts to shoppers and free drinks to all comers.

The Hotel Gansevoort served as the official party hub. The lines for free back rubs and free haircuts wrapped halfway around the rooftop pool.

It seemed the perfect setting. Centrally located smack in the middle of the Gansevoort Market Historic District, right across Ninth Avenue from the pioneering neighborhood restaurant Pastis, the modish 14-story lodge, with its steely facade and clubby purple lights, has stood since 2004 as a glaring beacon of the ever-gentrifying area.

Perhaps no place better symbolizes what the modern meat market has become. In standoffs with the community over noise and offensive billboards, the Hotel Gansevoort has clearly established itself as that loud obnoxious neighbor with fashionable aims yet questionable tastes.

But, nowadays, looking out on the area from the hotel rooftop, you can’t help but notice the much bigger, badder building looming ominously on the horizon and wonder if the entire neighborhood might be moving right out from underneath it.

“The meatpacking district is about to shift 500 feet to the west,” predicted Richard Born, the Hotel Gansevoort’s landlord.

Mr. Born was talking about the forthcoming arrival of the Standard New York, hotelier André Balazs’ ambitious 18-story, 337-room lodge, erected on pillars over the elevated High Line park at the corner of Washington and West 13th Street, less than two blocks away.

Standing four stories taller and with nearly double the room capacity as the Hotel Gansevoort, with a beer garden, a pool and two restaurants, the hugely hyped Standard threatens to depose its barely four-year-old neighbor as the area’s trendiest hub.

“I think it’s going to be ground zero of the meatpacking district,” Mr. Born said of the new hotel, which is scheduled to open up to 150 guests rooms later this month, with the goal of becoming fully operational by spring.

“There’s no way in the world it’s not going to be hugely successful,” added Mr. Born, who comes from a rather unique perspective on the area’s changing hotel landscape. In addition to owning the Hotel Gansevoort property, which he leases to developer and operator Michael Achenbaum, Mr. Born is also a partner with Standard builder Mr. Balazs in the popular Mercer hotel in Soho. He further co-owns and co-operates two smaller inns, the Maritime and the Jane, located a few blocks north and a few blocks south, respectively, from the two rival hotel towers.

ONLY A YEAR AGO, the combined synergy of four stylish hotels located in such close proximity would seem entirely justified. Demand for hotel rooms in Manhattan had never been higher, with nightly rates and occupancy levels reaching record levels. Now, amid receding numbers of tourists and business travelers and otherwise widespread economic chaos, it’s beginning to resemble a glut.

Flanked on either side by less expensive accommodations and priced more in line with the larger, luxurious newcomer, the Hotel Gansevoort, with nightly rates this week ranging from $325 to $725, is perhaps the most vulnerable of the group.

“When business is great, you could withstand a little bit of competition,” said Mr. Born, who noted that the Hotel Gansevoort and Maritime had mutually thrived for years despite opening within a year of each other. “The market was rising the whole time,” he said. “Everything was absorbed. Nobody felt the effects. We didn’t feel them. They didn’t feel us. Right now, it’s working the other way. Dropping 300-and-some-odd rooms into the market is not going to be helpful to anybody.

“It will be the attraction,” Mr. Born said of the new Standard, “and there will be fewer customers to go around. I think the Gansevoort is going to be the hotel most affected by it.”

Not everyone in the neighborhood agrees with Mr. Born’s Gansevoort-Standard death-match scenario, particularly the Gansevoort’s proprietor, Mr. Achenbaum. “We don’t see the Standard as directly competitive with the Hotel Gansevoort,” he wrote in an email. “The Standard is known for a lower price point with more limited services, while the Hotel Gansevoort serves the luxury market. I am confident the Standard will be incrediby successful as the Hotel Gansevoort has run at such high occupancylevels and there is more than enough business for everybody.”

David Rabin, president of the Meatpacking District Initiative, agreed. “I don’t see it as a Gansevoort killer.”

A self-described “rising-tides-lift-all-boats kind of guy,” Mr. Rabin, the founder of the seminal local club Lotus, which is now closed, stands to benefit greatly from the Standard’s highly anticipated opening. His 85-seat Mexican eatery Los Dados is just down Washington Street from the new hotel.

“I think even people who aren’t going to stay there are going to come to check it out, have a drink there or go to an event there, and then they’re going to spread out through the neighborhood and they’re going to eat their meals somewhere else and they’re going to shop on their way out,” Mr. Rabin said.

It nonetheless could present a formidable challenge for the Hotel Gansevoort, he added.

“André is a master at style and marketing,” Mr. Rabin said of the Standard developer, Mr. Balazs. “Everyone could take lessons from André. He has a huge public persona and a huge network of contacts in the fashion, media and arts worlds. He’s just unbelievably well known and well liked. He’s just hard to compete with. But, you still have an area that has 40 restaurants and bars, as well as 75 high-end retailers. So people want to stay in the area. I think the Gansevoort holds its own. Yes, I think there are people who always want to go to whatever is brand new. But the Gansevoort is still a great location.”

Even detractors of both properties assert that the Hotel Gansevoort won’t be so easily supplanted as the new neighborhood status symbol.

Take Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, who has railed against both the Hotel Gansevoort for its offensive billboards, which remain despite some slight alterations, and the Standard for its grandiose scale and the lack of public input that went into its planning.

“I would certainly say that the Hotel Gansevoort sort of embodied everything bad about the new meatpacking district,” said Mr. Berman, citing the fights with neighbors and “hideous architecture” in particular. “Whether the Standard is going to overtake them in that regard, we’ll have to wait and see.”

cshott@observer.com

Mr. Born: I’ve got to believe that he was very methodical and careful because he actually spent years with this piece of property [the eventual Greenwich Hotel]. I think he liked us because we were probably a little more low-key than some of the obvious names. And I think he was comfortable also because, from a financial point of view, he wanted to know he was getting involved with people who were solid and would be up to the task.

This was back in 1999?

Mr. Drukier: I think we met Bob in 1999.

Mr. Born: Obviously, 9/11 was a bit of a speed bump. … This project picked up in about 2004. It was about a two-and-a-half, three-year construction process.

Mr. Drukier: It was longer than we’re used to.

Mr. Born: Very high-end custom work is just a whole other world. We’ve done projects in eight or nine months. We’ve done new construction buildings in less than two years. It’s not like that when you do something like this.

The Greenwich Hotel prides itself on the fact that no two rooms are alike. Do you consider it a masterpiece?

Mr. Born: It’s special because it’s as luxurious in its finish as anything we’ve ever done. When we built the Mercer, the one thing we said at the time is, over time we can justify all the stuff we did here because no one’s going to be crazy enough to spend so much money and put so much time and attention into it. Now we can say the same thing about this place.

Mr. Drukier: Bill Marriott came by yesterday afternoon. He just wandered into the lobby and I happened to be there. So I walked over and introduced myself and I walked him around a little. I told him, ‘You can take pictures of every room because I know nobody’s crazy enough to ever do this again.’ You saw the pool. We got there by trying to come up with a Japanese spa and what can we do to make it feel like that. We thought about this building in Japan we could bring over. We don’t typically bring buildings over from Japan.

Can you set me straight on the standoff with Landmarks over the hotel’s penthouse, which is bigger and bulkier than originally proposed?

Mr. Drukier: [Landmarks] had approved it, but [the Board of Standards and Appeals] made some changes to the approval which increased it a bit. We went back to the community board. They said fine. Then we didn’t for whatever reason go back to the full Landmarks Commission. We went to the Buildings Department and they signed off, so we have a perfectly valid building permit, but when it came time for Landmarks to sign off on the building, they noticed a discrepancy.

Are they going to make you tear it down?

Mr. Drukier: Our deal with them was that they would approve everything else on the rest of the building if we discontinued work on the penthouse until we came to an agreement and we did. … They have a half a dozen ideas that they’re looking at now. We hope some of them they’ll approve. I do think they believe it was a real mistake; it wasn’t something we did consciously. It was dumb, O.K.? It was dumb.

Talk about the state of the industry. Manhattan’s hotel boom has come to a screeching halt. If the industry is truly at a standstill, what do two usually busy hotel financiers do with themselves while awaiting the next upturn?

Mr. Born: Well, we kind of shifted into neutral about a year ago in anticipation of that. We had a very large project in midtown that we mothballed. We actually leased out a couple of sites that we would have otherwise built in anticipation of a slowdown. … It had all the flavor of a market that’s going to shut down. Hotels all of a sudden became the most popular means of developing a piece of property. There were 100 hotels announced, 90 percent were being built by people who had never built a hotel before and half of those were people who had never built a building before. It’s the kind of thing that when your taxi driver starts talking about the stock market, it’s time to sell.

So what now?

Mr. Born: A lot of parking lots [laughing]. One of the things that we are going to be looking for is picking up the pieces of something that didn’t work. We think we’re well positioned to work with lenders. We can build out, we can manage, and we can invest. So I think we’re going to be an attractive group to hook up with on a development that sort of got stalled. There will definitely be those situations around here.

One project that you’re now finishing up is the Jane, formerly the Hotel Riverview, in partnership with Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode, also your partners in the Bowery Hotel and the Maritime. The Jane is one of several old SRO buildings now being converted into a modern boutique hotel. Moving out tenants to make room for tourists and business travelers is a total headache. What’s the payoff?

Mr. Born: We don’t move people out.

Mr. Drukier: That’s called harassment.

Mr. Born: We have not asked anyone to leave the hotel. When we took over the hotel, there were 100 vacant rooms. Now there are 110 vacant rooms. People move out by attrition. The only ones we would ever ask to leave are the ones who don’t pay rent. We haven’t made financial inducements or anything like that. Everything we do is a headache. We did the Maritime Hotel. I remember walking the Maritime with Ian [Schrager] like the week after we closed and he turns to me and says, ‘Are you out of your mind? What are you going to do with this building?’ It was a funky, ugly building. Fifty percent of the building was sunk underground with a single-loaded corridor with oddly shaped walls. Architecturally, it was halfway between a landmark and a pariah. Most of the things that we do are curveballs.

You also took a big risk in signing on to manage the famously eccentric Chelsea Hotel last summer amid some nasty infighting among its owners. Ten months later, ownership turned on you, too, and abruptly terminated the contract. Now you’re in arbitration over money. Was taking that job a mistake?

Mr. Born: Ira and I are owners in every project that we’ve built and managed in the past. That is the single exception. … We had hoped that over time that we’d be able to get some ownership interest.

Mr. Drukier: It was along the lines of no good deed goes unpunished. One of the owners who obtained control of the property called me. She’d never run a hotel before. She said, ‘Can you help us?’ After we talked about it, we said, ‘We’ll figure out a way to do it.’ It wasn’t anything for economic reasons; it was simply because we thought it was a great building and it could be brought to a beautiful level, with the tenants, with the quirky nature of the building, with all of that stuff intact, without stripping it out and turning it into a Holiday Inn or something. That kind of change takes a really delicate hand. The tenants got very upset, but not necessarily with us, with the nature of things. …

They were upset about the upheaval in general.

Mr. Drukier: They liked [former manager] Stanley Bard. I like Stanley Bard, too. I had nothing to do with Stanley Bard staying or going.

Mr. Born: Frankly, I think the operating income of the hotel was up by 150 percent in the first year of our operations, with no capital investment, just tweaking operations. We think we did a great job for the owners. They just had their own way of wanting to do it. There was no fight about us staying or leaving. When they said, ‘We want to do it our way,’ we said, ‘Fine, here are the keys.’ The only dispute is about money.

Can anyone manage that unruly property?

Mr. Drukier: Stanley Bard [laughing].

Mr. Born: The question is, are you going to be able to gain the love of both the tenants and the owners. We thought we were fine with the owners until they said they weren’t happy. A couple of the tenants were really beating down on us. I don’t think for any good reason.

Mr. Drukier: We mopped down the floors and they complained.

Do you have any advice for Andrew Tilley, the gentleman who’s running it now?

Mr. Drukier: Hang on tight to that pole so you can balance on the tight rope.

cshott@observer.com

The show, curated by Chelsea resident and photographer Linda Troeller with the help of hotel co-owner (and rumored interim manager) David Elder, opens May 9 and runs through Sunday, May 11, from noon to 6 p.m.

The exhibition comes at a pivotal time for the iconic-yet-embattled lodge, which saw its second management shakeup in less than a year last week.

The New York Post today reports on the ouster of corporate manager BD NY Hotels, which The Observer reported last week. (Expect further details of the shakeup in Wednesday's Observer.)

Full details on the show (and obligatory namedropping of the hotel's famous inhabitants) are as follows:

CELEBRATING THE 125th ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHELSEA HOTEL
PHOTO EXHIBITION ON MAY 9 - 11

THE CHELSEA HOTEL, a historic landmark hotel and an iconic gathering place for artists in all genres turns 125 years old this year. To celebrate this glamorous outpost of Bohemia, photographers will exhibit their work in homage to this inspirational place where luminaries such as Mark Twain, Madonna, and Martha Graham worked.

The exhibition will be held in the hotel, located at 222 W 23rd St. It opens Friday, May 9 and runs through Sunday, May 11 from noon to 6pm. (It is the weekend before the first New York Photography Festival.) ³The show will unite colleagues in a celebration of this cultural icon,² says curator Linda Troeller, a longtime resident of the hotel and the author of a recent photo book, Hotel Chelsea Atmosphere: An Artist¹s Memoir.

David Elder, a Vice President of the hotel, will co-curate the exhibit with Troeller. They have selected editorial, advertising, music, portraits and art projects shot in the hotel. ³The show is meant to capture the hotel¹s unique visual history in this time when a lot of NYC history is vanishing,²Dear says Troeller, an award-winning photographer whose photographs of the Chelsea Hotel were recently published in the NY Times, Flair Magazine, (Italy) and Le Monde 2 (Paris).

Built in 1884 as the tallest building in New York, the hotel has a famous staircase surrounding 10 floors. While the roster of residents past and present reads like a Who¹s Who in the art world, the magnetic draw reaches further. For many of the hotel¹s illustrious residents, it is about the ability to bring their dreams to fruition. Photographer Ralph Gibson created his first Lustrumbook while living in the hotel in the early 70's; Magnum photographersHenri Cartier Bresson and Inga Morath and Robert Mapplethorpe also lived in the hotel.Whether or not you believe Sid Vicious still haunts the place or if Dylan Thomas fell into his fatal coma after drinking 18 whiskies here, the hotel is filled with dreams and art of several generations, some of which is scattered through the building.

The community and press are invited to join in the spirit of the creativity the hotel has fostered and wish a happy birthday to the Chelsea Hotel.

The controversial management team, which installed a rookie, 26-year-old Glennon Travis in the place of the veteran manager, Mr. Bard, has claimed in court papers that it has "fully performed its obligations" under a three-year contract, signed last June, and further asserted that the hotel was more profitable on its watch than when Mr. Bard ran the place.

Over the first six months of its oversight, BD NY claims, the hotel's income increased by 225 percent and occupancy increased from 73 to 88 percent.

Moreover, BD NY claims that the hotel's owners owe the ousted managers a whopping $2.7 million in "incentive" fees, which have not been paid.

A hearing is scheduled for May 5.

But, two weeks ago, the hotel's infamously ousted manager made a rare appearance, joining the director Milos Forman (himself a former hotel resident) for an on-camera interview smack-dab in the middle of the lobby.

"The new management comes running out of the back and is like, 'You can’t shoot that here!'" said the writer Ed Hamilton, a 13-year resident of the iconic lodge on West 23rd Street. "He tried to charge Stanley $600 to film in the lobby. Of course, Stanley wouldn't pay that."

Mr. Hamilton relayed the recent lobby incident during a panel discussion about the historic and embattled hotel last night at the Museum of the City of New York.

Mr. Hamilton, author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living With the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca, interviewed Mr. Bard himself recently for a short video by fellow hotel resident and filmmaker Sam Bassett.

In the interview, played during the panel discussion, Mr. Bard took a few jabs at the hotel's controversial new managers.

"There are a lot of things, naturally, that I'm not very happy with," he said, citing specifically the recent evictions of some longtime hotel residents. "I don't like putting nice people out. I don’t like putting people that love the hotel out—I’m not happy with them even trying to do that. I could understand that they want to enhance the value or the so-called value. But my philosophy is you can enhance value by a lot of things, not just monetarily. …

"We’re not always going to be in this bubble. We’re not always going to be in this economic boom, hotel-wise, etc. And when you satisfy people and make them happy in your hotel then they will want to return. …

"Under my management, we had the highest repeat business of probably any hotel in the world. I think that enhances value more so than just the bottom line. So my philosophy is a little different than theirs."

Asked whether he hopes to someday return as manager, Mr. Bard replied, "I'm not getting any younger, but my son is," referring to David Bard, his heir apparent. "I think that over the years he's learned to appreciate more this hotel than he did as a young person. He may have felt I forced him into it. ... That wasn't my intent. I wanted him to respect the hotel and appreciate it. I felt that someday he would want to be here on his own.

"Unfortunately, I think that has happened. And they don't want him here. They want outside management, which blows my mind. I don't understand why. This outside management has no idea about the Chelsea Hotel or what the Chelsea Hotel is about. David, you understand, has every knowledge of the hotel—every inch of knowledge of the hotel. And that is exactly what is necessary in this hotel. He would be the best person for that job—not an outside manager that is here once a week or twice a week for a few hours. ..."

Since his highly publicized ouster last summer, Mr. Bard has been "writing ... thinking ... reminiscing," basically working on his long-awaited memoirs after nearly 50 years as the hotel's manager, he said.

"Keep loving the hotel, keep spreading its good name," he urged the hotel's remaining residents. "Keep creating."

Also during last night's panel discussion, the writer Mr. Hamilton discussed Mr. Bard's "congenial inability to admit that anything bad has ever taken place in the hotel"—reading aloud perhaps this reporter's favorite passage from Legends, a tale in which Mr. Bard gracefully glosses over the apparent drug overdose of a longtime resident; instead, suggesting that the deceased was merely traveling in Europe.

Sherill Tippins, author of the forthcoming Dream Palace: The Extraordinary Life of the Chelsea Hotel, discussed hotel architect Philip Huber's original utopian vision for the building, Manhattan's first co-op, constructed during a particularly greedy era in the city's history.

Former Chelsea Now editor Lawrence Lerner, meanwhile, discussed how the changes at the Chelsea mirrored a larger trend of developers converting former artist flophouses, also including the Gramercy Park Hotel and the Hotel Breslin, into hip boutique hotels.

Hear what the charismatic former manager of the embattled Chelsea Hotel has been up to since his controversial ouster last summer, what he thinks about the new management and ongoing eviction proceedings, as well as his vision for the future of the iconic 125-year-old lodge, of which he remains the majority owner.

Mr. Bard's remarks will follow a panel discussion with preservationist Edward Kirkland and writers Ed Hamilton, author of the 2007 book Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca, and Sherill Tippins, author of the forthcoming Dream Palace: The Extraordinary Life of the Chelsea Hotel.

The event starts at 6:30.

On opening day, management also kicked out a reviewer for the hospitality industry site Hotel Chatter, abruptly canceling her reservation.

And she wasn't even requesting a cheap press rate! To wit: