The Last Hotel: 12/30/07

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Nataliya

During an era of 'ethnic cleansing', Nataliya's parents escaped from their village in a small eastern European country which no longer officially exists and managed to safely cross the Atlantic with their children. While her parents toiled in the wage-slave industries to make ends meet, Nataliya grew up on the streets of the city, regularly singing with siblings and others in their immigrant community street festivals. When her youngest brother landed in prison for murder, Nataliya served a brief sentence for harboring a fugitive. She married and divorced within a year of graduating from high school, then decided to pursue a career as a hair stylist and began working her way through beauty college as a part-time housekeeper in the Ticonderoga. Late one night last year, she discovered Lester Davison on the subway and they fell for each other like the deuce in a house of cards. She convinced Angel to give Lester a steady gig and in no time flat, our young lovers were writing and occasionally performing together; if you're a regular, you've already witnessed Nataliya's haunting voice slinking its way around Lester's puckish piano stylings in the Troubador lounge.

Maria

Before running away to the city with a local truck driver, Maria was brought up in an isolated farming community out west with several siblings and cousins, occasionally attending bilingual classes in a tiny schoolhouse. When the truck driver left her to return to his wife, Maria found herself homeless, unemployed and alone, living 2,000 miles away from her estranged family. It was late autumn and she was five months pregnant with nothing more than a five dollar bill in her pocket when Francis hired her. He put her in a room with another housekeeper and she went to cleaning rooms and laundry the next day. Soon afterwards, Maria was introduced to a childless couple, Mark and Penny, who later agreed to adopt her baby. In Room 505 early the following year, during the city's worst snowstorm, Bonita Ray was born, and every other morning at 9 AM sharp, Penny brings the little one to visit Mama Maria at the hotel.

Monday, December 31, 2007

Julius

As the hotel's chief of security, Julius endeavors to act in the best interests of the guests and staff--whether the crisis he's dealing with is a lost child, a missing purse, or a drunken brawl. Prior to his stint with the Ticonderoga, Julius was the head of a successful security and investigations agency, from which he retired after the accidental death of his beloved canine comrade, Mojo (whom, incidentally, Julius later had stuffed and mounted.) A cousin of Francis Blum and the son of taxidermists, Julius has always been a lover of animals (living and dead) and manages a sizable collection of stuffed birds and mounted insects, not to mention several aquariums filled with various live arachnidian, reptilian, amphibious and aquatic creatures.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Ignacio

Ignacio came to the country in the back of a truck when he was 17 years old. The distant relatives he arrived with were all captured and deported, but Ignacio traveled further north with an accordion, performing on street corners and occasionally finding work as a day laborer in construction crews, orchards, poultry plants and restaurant kitchens on his way to the city. "Iggy" previously worked with Maria in a small restaurant--when he was slightly more literate than legal--and taught her how to play the guitar while she tutored him to read and write Spanish and English, and (with Jim Battery's help) he obtained a work visa. Today, he dreams of bringing his family safely over the border and opening his own nightclub in the city. He usually spends his evenings off playing traditional corridos with a small conjunto band in various local cantinas, taquerias and subway trains.

A Brief History

The legendary Hotel Ticonderoga emerged in the post-WWII 1940s and early 1950s, when she was regarded as a premier lodging for revolutionaries, artists and writers seeking refuge in the city. Prior to that storied era when the famous (and infamous) called her home as she served as a cradle to the innumerable creative--and frequently incendiary--works conceived within her rooms, the Ticonderoga's legacy was already renowned.

After the brazenly conspicuous Troubador speakeasy--better-known to her regulars as "The 4-V" (a play on the anagram for "In vino veritas")--burned down under mysterious circumstances in late 1925, the 4-V's owners opened "The Troubador Hotel" (affectionately known as "The New True") as a 4-star hotel one block and a half from her namesake's location in mid-October 1929 mere days before the stock market collapse.
Due to considerable secret foreign investments (via the American Communist Party) she stayed afloat through the Depression, opening her own bistro behind the lobby at the end of WWII (which took over the Troubador name and thus the hotel was re-christened "The Hotel Ticonderoga", in homage to the small town which the French-Canadian DuMondes--the Troubador's original owners--called home.)
Through the 1950s, the Ticonderoga's reputation as a bohemian 'romper room' for artists and writers remained unsullied. But gracing her guestbook's yellowed pages are the signatures of well-known pseudonyms for several (potentially-disgraced) FBI agency chiefs, whose scrutiny during the McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts, the Ticonderoga's most radical personnel and guests rarely, if ever, encountered. Coincidence?
The Hotel Ticonderoga is notorious for its conundrums.

The Muses

Perhaps the most singularly well-known, albeit infinitely horrific, event in the Ticonderoga's history concerns the tragic fate of the Muse Family, wherein the talented young singer, Bolivia Muse, and her husband, the trumpeter/composer Gabriel, died with their twins, Oliver and Juniper, in Room 214 (aka "The Suite Valentine"), victims of a still-shocking multiple murder-suicide.
Though several key facts have never been established, the story that has been passed down (courtesy of the Baroness DuMonde, long-time resident and widow to both of the original hotel proprietors) places the blame squarely upon the shoulders of the mischievous young Muse son, Oliver, who was apparently in love with his twin sister and waiting for an opportunity to justify murdering his parents in order to be left alone with her. We know from his correspondence with Juniper and from Bolivia's journal that the tormented boy witnessed the rape of his mother by his father's best friend; Bolivia's shame and failure to disclose the sexual attack to her husband was subsequently interpreted by the boy as evidence of her infidelity.
On the afternoon of February 12, 1937, after composing Bolivia's epitaph (along with several sexually-explicit poems to his sister, who apparently did nothing to dissuade his obsessions and most likely encouraged them) Oliver gassed his mother, and--inadvertently--Juniper, and himself in their large suite. Later that evening, Gabriel returned home to the terrible discovery of his dead family and hanged himself above their bodies.
Of course, Muse "sightings" in the Ticonderoga have never been uncommon. Sometimes the family appears together, pleasantly engaged in one another's company; separately, they bear ghastly tidings. Oliver's maleficence is always ominous, though rarely fatal to hotel guests; Juniper is usually accompanied by a tangible melancholy, but she has been known to bound playfully across passageways from one room into the next, calling out to her brother; Bolivia has been heard singing in empty corridors or rooms from opposite ends of the hotel; Gabriel's lifeless silhouette often appears at night, hanging from ceiling beams in darkened guest rooms above the beds of the most happily married couples.

The Muses tale is merely one among countless others woven into the fascinating human tapestry of the Hotel Ticonderoga's inimitable legacy.

The Last Hotel

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