Magic was afoot at the Chelsea, people said. For about ten dollars a
week, you could rent a room next to Edie Sedgwick or hang out on the roof with
Allen Ginsberg. You and your neighbors could share ideas, music, money,
clothes, hot-plate meals, and maybe beds, if you were lucky, under the
protection of a manager not much older than you. The more outside mainstream
society you were, the more inside you would be here, drinking beer at El
Quijote with Bobby Neuwirth, exchanging nods on the stairs with Betsey Johnson
and her new lover John Cale, and squeezing to the back of the elevator with the
German anarchists and artists’ widows to make space for the tourists, music
producers, miniskirted models, and globetrotters in from Goa who also wished to
join the scene.
