Stacy Horn

I was out running errands.  And I forgot my camera.  And I treated myself to a new pen.  And I lost the pen not twenty minutes later.  And I am an idiot.  Wait a minute.  What the hell was on my tv when I took that shot.  What are those guys doing??

I’ve posted about this hotel several times.  I’ve had my eye on it for years.  It sits on the corner of Barrow and West Street, that’s the highway along the Hudson River. My fantasy was I’d buy it and me and my friends would live in it as a retirement home of sorts.  Someone else bought it, replaced the windows, and it has sat ever since, no more renovations, no nothing. More below …

I posted the following (and this picture) last year.

It was the Knickerbocker Hotel until 1910. After the Knickerbocker closed it became the New Hotel Keller, and then the Keller Abington Hotel, and since 1993 it’s been shortened to the Hotel Keller (although on the notices plastered on the door it’s still referred to as “Keller Abington Hotel”). The bar at street level was a gay bar from 1956 – 1998. [That’s a lot of history.] No mention of where the name Keller came from. The owner wasn’t named Keller. The new owner plans to keep the first floor commercial and the rest will be converted into apartments.

I keep meaning to research it a little more during one of my trips to the library, but every time I’m there I forget. I was just there too, and I had a little downtime. I always do. I’ll be waiting for a book and have time to putter and do something else while I wait.

I don’t know why I’m attracted to this hotel. It’s not a particularly attractive building and it’s not in a particularly attractive spot. I guess just because it’s abandoned. It has that lost, crumbling, forgotten appeal.

I’m trying to find a song that played on a Sex and the City episode that aired last night called: Three’s a Crowd.  It’s from season 1.

I’ve been unsuccessful so far and it’s killing me. It was a snippet from an opera, it sounded like. I loved it! I even tried to find Dan Lieberstein’s email, the music editor from the show, but no luck.

I’ve googled and googled, and I just thought I’d post this plea. You never know.

I planned to watch movies all day, but so far I am suffering from attention deficit disorder, it seems like.  Nothing has held my attention except the 13th episode of Dollhouse, which was great.  Now I’m back in on Dollhouse, and I had given up.

Every year they close off 46th Street for Brazilian Independence Day and my band plays all day, and I mean all day. When I was younger and more determined my hands were bleeding by the end of the day. The festival keeps getting bigger and bigger. It used to be just one block of 46th, now it’s 46th Street for a bunch of blocks and 6th Avenue for I don’t know how many blocks. It’s HUGE.

This is a big stage they erect now every year on 6th. We rarely play on the stage. We’re a street band.

The police kept telling us to move. We’re very loud and invariably some store would complain. This is us telling the crowd which direction we’re going. Ivo (the band leader) finally just had us play while we paraded up and down 6th, which was very clever. The police couldn’t ask us to move because we were constantly moving.

One of my band mates brought her baby and she put these huge headphones on him to protect him. Those girls are smart to wear gloves (to protect from bleeding hands). I kept meaning to wear golfing gloves, the ones with the fingers cut out but constructed to maintain a good grip, but I never got around to it.

I’m taking care of a friend’s cat this weekend who lives in Hell’s Kitchen. I haven’t been up there in years and I was a little nervous about what it might look like. The last time I was there it was on its way to total gentrification, and it was one of the last places that looked like the New York of my youth and I couldn’t bear it.

Turns out my neighborhood is a thousand times worse, and the total gentrification didn’t happen up here. It’s kind of a nice mix of old and new. And my favorite restaurant Ralph’s is still there!

And lots of places that are not Starbucks.

A close-up so you can see they are selling pig toes, for the love of God, among other things.