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"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel," poet-composer Leonard Cohen sang of his affair with the raspy-voiced belter Janis Joplin. The fabled inn has been a nest for many artists, poets, writers, and musicians and an inspiration for many more, from Arthur C. Clarke to Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, and Bob Dylan. The New York artist Chris Tucci first entered the hallowed precincts three years ago, when he was 23, and its famous, and infamous, residents have haunted him ever since. The result of his obsession is a graphic novel, The Doorman, the first installation of which will be available in February at the Ace Hotel, New York, which also commissioned the New Jersey-raised Tucci to create original pen-and-ink drawings and murals. The artist has described his literary endeavor as "an improbable love story," in which a middle-aged doorman at the Hotel Canterbury, a rickety building in the bland city of Silvertown, falls for the Edie Sedgwick-like Girl — beautiful, fragile, and unobtainable. Layered into this plot are other themes, including the fight for and against gentrification, as the Canterbury faces demolition to make way for the city’s grand Six Bridges project. Each cel is densely drawn, filled with overlapping and painstaking details of the urban setting — suffocating but scintillating.

acehotel.com