Brendan Behan’s Footsteps in NYC
For all the cities where the lifestyle is just right for boutique hotels, New York holds a special place above all the others. There is a kind of elegance about New York, one that wholly original, and one that is based on a history of cultural mixing. In New York, languages and ideas blend together in combinations that just don’t exist anywhere else. These combinations are evident in the street, in the art, and in the design of things. The boutique hotels here recognize the balance necessary to mix visual styles, and the result is a splendid comfort and gracefulness. Guests here will find themselves living in the heart of luxury, in the heart of the world.
New York has a heartbeat that is exactly like humanity, and it’s an energy that’s attracted artists and writers for many years. One of New York’s celebrated residents, although it wasn’t for very long, is the great Irish playwright Brendan Behan. Brendan Behan was born in 1923 in Dublin, and lived in that metropolitan center for most of his life. But some of his peak years were spent in the heart of New York City. He stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, like hundreds of other famous artists, and lived some rather hearty moments here.
Although his influence on the generations of writers that followed him is large, his output is actually quite modest. Having written only a few plays, he was wise enough to make them some of the more brilliant plays in the English language. With works such as “The Quare Fellow,” and “The Hostage,” he secured a place for himself on the shelves of great literary geniuses. It was the success of “The Hostage,” a work he translated himself from Irish, that brought him to New York for a long run. It was during this run that he started working on some of his last drinking binges that brought him to the end of his life. So, his time in New York was not necessarily very pretty, but he wrote about the city with an articulateness that marks a true marriage between a great writer and a great city. His influence is still here, in the bars and the theatres. The love of Brendan Behan for New York is a familiar one in the Irish diaspora, and he saw a promise here that many before and since have also seen and pursued, their demons and angels dragging behind them.
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