Optioned by Lionsgate for TV Serial Production.

During its heyday, the Chelsea Hotel in New York City was a home and safe haven for Bohemian artists, poets, and musicians such as Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Alan Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, and Dee Dee Ramone. This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic façade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s. Providing a window into the late Bohemia of New York during that time, countless interviews and firsthand accounts adorn this social history of one of the most celebrated and culturally significant landmarks in New York City.

Exuberant oral history...Drug-fueled debauchery and artists living 'close to the bone' in service to their work fill these reminiscences along with nostalgia for the enclave of 'freaks and weirdoes.'

--Publisher’s Weekly

The book mostly tells fantastical yet real-life tales of many of its lesser- or unknown residents, adds depth to some that the public knew only peripherally, and shares many wild, unhinged anecdotes that marked a very different era of New York City life.
--Larry Getlen, The New York Post

It's a pleasure, with lots of great loopy stories.

--Jed Perl, of The New Republic

Junkies, beats, smugglers, punks, dealers, lowlifes, artists, it's a look behind the doors of the Chelsea Hotel in its final glory years - fascinating and riveting.

-- Gillian McCain. co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

... a colorful oral history ... that often focuses on lesser-known faces of the landmark... making this a good option for fueling the fire of serious Chelsea obsessives.

--Hazel Cills, NYLON Magazine

. . . a wonderful picture of the lives of some of the hotel's latter day famous guests . . . wonderful descriptions of the building itself... Lough's writing belies a true passion for this 'beautiful old whore' of a building. His research is clearly a labor of love.

--David Wills, Beatdom


Rife with colorful anecdotes, the book is sure to find a place in the homes of artists, writers and thinkers of all stripes.

--Erika Jo Brown, Savannah Morning News