What's becoming an all-too-familiar New York story ... about Taylor Mead, an 88-year-old poet and pal of Andy Warhol, who is battling his millionaire landlord on the Lower East Side to remain in his $380/month rent-stabilized apartment that he has called home for 34 years:
Mead’s friends suspect [real estate mogul Ben] Shaoul wants the poet to evict himself. “It’s going to kill him,” said Clayton Patterson, a neighborhood activist and longtime friend. “This is elderly abuse. It’s pretty Third World when you think about it.”
Mead is one of the last survivors of the Beat generation. He performed in several Warhol movies, including an hourlong silent film that starred only his buttocks. He was the focus of a 2005 documentary and performed weekly at the Bowery Poetry Club for nearly a decade before it closed last year. The old artist can barely stand. When he’s not watching “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Judge Judy” and sipping chocolate milk, he’s writing poems. He can only leave his apartment, a trek from the top floor, a few times a week.Keep reading HERE.
Meanwhile, the drama never ends at the Chelsea Hotel, where a gas outage has left hundreds of residents without heat -- more snow is on its way!!! -- and City Council Spokeswoman Christine Quinn ripping the building's new owner. (He's also being fined.) Read HERE.