YOUR WEEKLY COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER SERVING CHELSEA, HUDSON YARDS & HELL’S KITCHEN
Hell’s Kitchen Call Center Answers Needs of Louisiana Flood Victims
Photo by Marko Kokic, courtesy American Red Cross
BY ALEX ELLEFSON Volunteers at the American Red Cross office in Hell’s Kitchen are helping to coordinate relief efforts for victims of the catastrophic flooding in Louisiana. A call center, housed in the Red Cross building on W. 49th St., began fielding calls last week to bring aid to regions of southeastern Louisiana deluged by more than two feet of water. At least 30 volunteers work in shifts to guide resources to victims of the disaster — which the Red Cross is calling LOUISIANA continued on p. 2
THE WAITING ROOM
Simone Leigh’s installation and residency at the New Museum includes a series of care sessions and public programs. See page 20.
Photo by Linda Troeller, courtesy Schiffer Publishing
Gerald Busby in his fifth floor apartment (from Linda Troeller’s 2015 “Living in the Chelsea Hotel” photography collection).
MEET THE MAN ON THE FIFTH FLOOR BY PUMA PERL What makes a successful businesswoman like Jessica Robinson walk away from her career to become a filmmaker? Over the course of 35 years running Robinson Creative Services, an advertising design studio, her client list included names like Condé Nast and American Express. Previously, as a creative director in advertising, she made videos for an equally prestigious list of clients, including The Graduate Center, CUNY. That pretty much sums up her film experience. As we sat watching raw footage of “The Man on the Fifth Floor: 3 Decades in the Chelsea Hotel,” Robinson elaborated on her inspiration. “One day [Dec. 16, 2007], I happened to open the New York Times to the Neediest Cases section, and there was Gerald Busby. I was shocked. Here was my friend, composer of Robert Altman’s ‘3 Women,’ child piano protégé, raconteur, and one of the most charming men I’d ever met, featured as one of the year’s neediest cases. What had happened? I had to find out. I had to tell this quintessentially New York story of culture and counterculture; this iconic story of New York City and a lost Bohemia. I had to become a filmmaker.” The events that brought Busby, now 80, to the attention of the New York Times could not have been imagined when he first
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arrived in the city several decades earlier. Nobody had yet even heard of HIV/AIDS. The bathhouses and clubs were jumping, and many gay men like himself were giddy with this new, post-Stonewall freedom. Busby and his younger lover, the late Sam Byers, both eventually tested HIV-positive. Sam suffered a long, lingering death, Busby by his side (he was 58 when Sam passed away; they’d been together for 18 years). Depressed and traumatized, he stopped composing and tried to escape through sex and drug binges. He went bankrupt. After three rehab stints, he finally found sobriety in 2005, and returned to composing music. Several weeks after my meeting with Robinson, I knocked at the door of Gerald Busby’s fifth floor apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, where the “renovations” are ongoing; the halls were draped in plastic, and warnings against photographing inside the building were taped up next to Stop Work Orders. Busby is one of about 80 residents who have hung in; a tenants union now protects their rights to remain in their rent-stabilized units. When the nattily dressed Busby answered the door, smiling widely, I immediately understood why Robinson called him “charming.” From almost the moment we began chatting, I was BUSBY continued on p. 4 VOLUME 08, ISSUE 34 | AUGUST 25 - 31, 2016