84 newyork| november11–24, 2019
design huntingTheKitchen
Thekitchenhasitsowncolorful
vibe,andthemannequinheadssport
someofDeCock’swigdesigns.TheStillLifeOvertheRadiator
DeCockhasn’t doneany majorwork
sincemovingin,beyondpainting
andrepainting.Thefloralstilllife
onsilkbyRobertBushongabove
theradiatorwasfoundat a nearby
fleamarket.space,” DeCock says, “and I was always
out there. It’s where I would paint.” He
used to get to it via sliding glass doors
high up on his kitchen wall, accessed by a
ladder. The doors have since been boarded
up, victims of the hotel’s ongoing renova-
tion, but the ladder is still there.
Bard was forced out in 2007, and the
building was sold to developers in 2011. It
was then sold twice more. Many of the old-
timers left, and the DIY garden on the roof
that DeCock and others had planted and
tended was brutally destroyed. But
DeCock, an artist and a hairdresser—
wearing, when I met him, blue jeans, sus-
penders, and Renaissance boots custom-
made by a shoemaker in the Catskills—is
among those who remain. His psychedelic
interior is still adorned with Mardi Gras
beads, the walls painted and repainted in
silver and jewel tones, the windows shed-
ding stained-glass light as they too have
been painted over. He built a loft bed when
he moved in and kept the two pieces of fur-
niture that had been left there, a bureau
and console, adding some glittery curtains
to hide his office space beneath the bed.
You access the apartment from the floor
below: His door opens right onto a stair-
case. Boom, start climbing up to his living
room, and be careful not to trip, because
your eye is drawn to the hundreds of pho-
tographs plastered along the wall.
“I originally set out doing this as a kind
of eulogy and trying to preserve some-
thing before it was totally gone,” Colin
Miller says of the photos he took for Hotel
Chelsea: Living in the Last Bohemian
Haven, from which the pictures shown
here were taken. (The hotel is being re-
made and reopened by a team including
the accomplished faux-hemian hotelier
Sean MacPherson.) “I was amazed at the
resilience of people and that people were
still leading amazing lives there.”
“I remember the days of yore, when
there was a great freak-community cama-
raderie,” says DeCock. “I actually look at it
like a lesson in being Zen,” he adds of the
stress of the renovation. “It’s actually been
really good for me in that way. I mean, we’re
all dealing with construction; we live in New
York City, right? It’s everywhere.” ■