Has the Chelsea Hotel Kicked Out Their Douchey New Management?
The longtime manager of bohemian artist enclave the Chelsea Hotel, Stanley Bard, was ousted last year, leaving the door open for total capitalist tightasses to take over and evict long-term tenants. Today, the Chelsea Hotel blog reports that the new management team might be on their way out. Who to blame?
The subprime meltdown and Bear Stearns, possibly!
We have received reliable information to the effect that, as of May 5, BD Hotels will no longer be managing the Chelsea Hotel. They have reportedly been fired by minority shareholder Marlene Krauss, Harvard MBA, who, together with lobby layabout David Elder, controls the Chelsea's Board of Directors.
To the best of our knowledge, here's what happened: BD, with the connivance of the minority shareholders, had planned all along to buy the Chelsea Hotel. To accomplish this they needed a smoking gun to pressure the Bard Family into selling the building. But apparently Stanley ran a pretty tight ship: teams of accountants working 24-hours-a-day could find no such smoking gun. So the Bards have no reason to sell. And now, due to the sub-prime crisis, BD Hotels—which we hear had a chunk of its assets financed by Bear Stearns — has no money to buy the building anyway.
