CORRECTION: Nicole Brydson wrote in an email that neither John Ford nor his brother Juan ever lived with her. Rather the Ford bros just slept on her floor. Fordsy!!! Also, I spelled Nicole’s name wrong and she’s from NYC not the Hamptons. Yes, I’m retarded.
Left, Paul Sevigny and Vegas being filmed by Inigo Gilmore on the front steps on The Chelsea Hotel, AC. Right, drink in hand…Pics by Lindsay Boisvert.
You’ve been invited to a “soft-opening” party by the owners of the Beatrice Inn for their new venture, The Chelsea Hotel in Atlantic City. A bus to AC is supposed to leave from the corner of Jane St and 8th Ave at 7pm. It’s a Friday, 25 July. You were told there were only 10 seats for your friends, but by 7:30pm you realize there are 60 seats on the (pink) bus, most empty. You call everyone you’ve ever met, ever. You get the bus driver high as he wheels around the city picking up everyone you ever met, ever.
8:30pm. The bus leaves with thirty or so people, including two middle-age Turkish guys, a half-dozen Euro females (a Slovene, an Austrian, two Italianos, two Brits), a black chick w/ fake tits and Ivy League degree, etc. A lot of laws are being violated (mostly by your lawyer). A makeshift bar, two seats covered in ice, is stocked with every kind of booze. There’s a British Elvis impersonator/television correspondent filming everything. You don’t care because you know you get to keep the tapes.
You realize by 9pm that this is the best bus you’ve ever been on, ever. That’s due to the whos and whats of the party. See, the Beatrice Inn is New York’s sole “dive-club.” In less than two years it has branded an unparalleled party ethos—one that combines everything downtown that’s not lame or too trashy with pure excess. It translates quite well to a bus party.
Loud indie and rap music via iPod doc spark a dance party. People yell, hug, scream, sing songs, make-out, do drugs, smoke hash and weed, all the good stuff—and you’re still on the bus. You love that the Beatrice party ethic isn’t irony based like the BK/LES scenes, nor is it status based like the Meatpacking or Chelsea (how else do you explain your loser-ass riding on this bus).
Upon arrival you’re greeted by Paul Sevigny, the DJ, ex-promoter, Beatrice Inn owner, A.R.E. Weapons band member, and former Club Anthrax-goer who is originally from Darien, CT. He wears an old, ripped navy blue sweater with light tan pants. He walks your whole party into the lobby. The all white modernist space is furnsihed with purple couches and phallic lamps and jammed with a weird mix of Philly-area middle age tourists and downtown New Yorkers sipping stiff drinks from red plastic cups.
“The party is in the penthouse,” Sevigny says. “Sign up for rooms here. And thanks for coming.”
Sevigny’s sister is Chloe, the actress, and that surely helped his rise. But you can’t deny the brilliant Britpop/punk/post-punk/downtown-style Paul perfected in the late 90s and early 2000s. The Sevigny style wasn’t wigger-y and druggy like Supreme/Vice, the era’s other dominant downtown vibe. It was just cool and fun. But like Supreme and Vice, Sevigny has proven one of NYC’s most durable brands. Take when you recently interviewed at a national gossip magazine, and the first question they asked you was if you had access to Beatrice. “That’s the only club we really care about,” the weekly’s news editor said. “Nowhere else gets the celebs acting as wasted and slutty.” Not wanting to sell people out for money, you never took the gig, but Beatrice certainly is unique in the celebs-gone-wild respect. For example, Heath Ledger’s last stop on Earth was Beatrice.
You remember going to Spa Wednesdays, an early 2000s party Sevingy hosted on 13th St in Union Sq. (Spa’s the club Vince Vaugh and Jon Faverau went to with Diddy in the movie Made.) You remember the all-white side-room, where Razzle the dreaded HC kid did the Afro-beat party. And the time Smelly Tom bought Veuve bottles for the now-bargain price of, like, $100 per bottle. All the Brazilian girls. “Michael James” as the door name. Stone Roses into James into Sex Pistols…
Penthouse beer filled tub. On the bus.
Yeah, Spa was awesome. And Sevigny continued his Wednesday reign, most recently at Marquee, a party he ran until Beatrice opened.
Anyway, back to AC. You go upstairs to your room. It has what looks like Johnatan Adler everything, very cheesy modern. The bed is huge and the window faces the epic, black and white striped Tropicana tower.
At 1230 am you go upstairs to the penthouse party. Sixty or so people bounce about the 1500-sq ft two bedroom space. You see some people you’ve known for a decade (what up Gabe Banner!), a guy who you went the Yankees game with that Tuesday, and a dude you met the previous Thursday. You like everyone you meet. Lots of joints, blunts, endless tequila and rum…two DJs play rock classics on a Mac. You learn that the Hotel’s fifth floor is to feature a pool side club [Note: It opens this weekend]. The party never ends, really, and at noon the next day people are still sipping cocktails on the penthouse balcony. Down on the beach, everyone else lays out or swims.
You realize this is more fun than a summer Saturday in the city. Imagine, Las Vegas but with cool people, only 90 minutes from NYC. You think: If these guys (Sevigny has a partner named Matt Abramyck) pull this off—if they make perpetually down and out Atlantic City cool—they will become the nightlife industry’s premium brand.
Back in New York a few days later, The Observer real estate section runs a meta piece about The Chelsea. The girl who wrote it, Nicole Brysdon, used to live in Boston with your former coworker John Ford, an aspiring librarian and the inventor of “tripping juice.” Brysdon’s from East Hamptons, and her esoteric essay is about the decline and fall of America and American real estate in the context of AC, the Hamptons, and Williamsburg. But the Beatrice world is not a symbol of America as a nation; it’s just a fun counter-culture. Nevertheless, Brysdon writes:
While Williamsburg has spent the last decade getting a face lift, Atlantic City did the same, with developers putting up towers on the waterfront. While Brooklyn got luxurious condos, Atlantic City got luxurious hotels: the Chelsea, the Borgata, the Water Club and, tallest of them all, Harrah’s. Crime and drugs are still busy in both, but hidden a few blocks in from the unsuspecting eye, and developers are falling over themselves to draw the young and the hip to the waterfront in both locations…
Though there’s still a very grimy element to Atlantic City–and, of course, the commercialization of everything, without apology–the nostalgia factor for that works in its favor. It is, after all, America’s playground, a microcosm of our dreams and woes: democracy and opportunity, crime and drugs. Nobody is hiding its woes, but gentrification might push those elsewhere. (Hence, the Williamsburg comparison.)
“Without that, it’s just trashy,” said Paul Sevigny, sporting a white Minor Threat-emblazoned Lacoste polo and peering out into the foggy night from a penthouse window atop the Chelsea. “But with it, it’s sleazy, and sleazy is way more fun.”
Yet neither Williamsburg nor AC are microcosms of America. Where else but Billyburg does Deerhunter play to 6000 people on a perfect Sunday the weekend after MGMT did the same (and does anyone outside BK even know who those bands are?). Billburg youth play kick ball and really, really identify with pirates. All the land is owned by Hasidic Jews, who make up .001% of the US population. At Marlowe and Sons Oyster Bar, you can eat a pig that was slaughtered in the backyard. America? That sounds more like space, nigga.
And Atlantic City is all the nation’s woes plus legal gambling. From purely a real estate perspective, Brysden has a good point. Both AC and Billburg did boom. But culturally they’re totally different cases. No one “young and hip” lives in AC! The murder rate in AC is war zone high; Billburg is a nation at peace. As a metaphor for America, AC’s a macro-cosm, not a micro one—the place is American insanity magnified.
At the Chelsea, you didn’t feel any sense of AC nostalgia. You didn’t see anyone wearing “ironic” AC tees or even really giving a shit about anything but the fact they were on the beach having fun with friends. Your days of coming down to the Taj poker room are a decade old. You don’t miss being a degenerate kid. You don’t miss $20 bjs from black hookers in the back of Ziti’s silver Honda hatchback. At all. That was then.
What works for The Chelsea and Team Beatrice is their collective nowness. No amount of sentimentality or metaphor can be used to capture that nowness, the newness. It’s this very urgency that makes you think The Chelsea could indeed set a precedent and create a new weekend spot for downtown’s kids.
TAGS: beer, Boston, Brooklyn, Drugs, iPod, kids, Las Vegas, Movie, Music, NATO, New York, NSA, paris, Pirates, war, wasted, williamsburg, Yankees
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
August 5th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Hi Ray,
I never lived with John Ford, and didn’t grow up in the Hamptons, but thanks for the link!
August 6th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
[...] and New York Magazine’s Grub Street picked up my way too over-the-top recollection of a bus trip to Atlantic City for the opening of the Beatrice Inn’s new hotel venture, The Chelsea. Big thanks to both, and [...]
August 7th, 2008 at 11:58 am
[...] got some attention by Gawker, New York Magazine and wearethemarket.com for Ray Lemoine’s series of posts about the VIP soft-opening of Paul Sevigny’s (Chloë’s brother, member of A.R.E. [...]