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For more than half her 90 years, Mildred Baker has lived quietly, elegantly, and happily at the Chelsea Hotel, perhaps the world's most notoriously bohemian hotel. Her neighbors have ranged from Andy Warhol to Sid Vicious, but Baker says nonchalantly, "There's nothing surprising or unusual about living here."
Mildred Baker, the oldest and longest-standing resident of New York's Chelsea Hotel, sits in Suite 524 surrounded by books, art, and the rolling cart she leans on for walking when her nurse is away.
Five floors down the grand marble staircase is the spot where Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend.
Three floors up from Baker, Madonna posed in Room 822 for photographs in her "Sex" book.
Thomas Wolfe wrote "You Can't Go Home Again" in Room 829.
Down in the lobby, where Baker collects her mail, Janis Joplin once wailed the blues.
The beautiful, the doomed, the brilliant, and the desperate - they've all passed through the halls of the Chelsea, the city's - and some say the world's - most notoriously bohemian residence.
Outside the heavy glass front doors on West 23rd Street hang plaques celebrating the hotel's more illustrious literati. Mark Twain. Dylan Thomas. Arthur Miller. Other plaques designate the 12-story red-brick building as a city, state, and national historic landmark.
Big, brilliantly colored paintings, traded by artists for rent, cover the lobby walls. Residents breeze through, one in a black suit with a trendy collarless shirt, another in spike heels with a dog on a leash. Teenagers bug the desk clerk about Sid. Tourists vie to spend the night in the Bob Dylan room.
Baker, alone, seems unimpressed.
Quietly, elegantly, and happily, Baker has lived at the Chelsea for more than half her 90 years. All that time spent in a place legendary for being cool has given her that elusive something that rests at the very heart of coolness - a genuine nonchalance. Such indifference - about such a place - comes only after a lifetime.
"There's nothing surprising or unusual about living here,"...