It's been a bad trip for the legendary bohemian Chelsea Hotel ever since longtime kooky owner Stanley Bard was kicked out as manager last year. As the Observer reports, Bard re-appeared to shoot an interview in the lobby of the hotel recently, and the following anecdote illustrates perfectly how the new corporate management are just complete tightasses: "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.'" [NY Observer] There are also several new books out or forthcoming about the Chelsea Hotel:

The aforementioned Ed Hamilton's Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca, came out last year. Inside: The Chelsea Hotel is a new photography book by Antonin Kratochvil and Julia Calfee. 2007's Chelsea Hotel Manhattan, by Joe Ambrose, recalls "extreme living" inside the sacred space. And for those with the taste for the inventive and psychotic, there's the old classic Chelsea Horror Hotel, a novel by the late Dee Dee Ramone.