Inside the dream palace : the life and times of New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel

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Title:

Author:

Tippins, Sherill

ISBN:

9780743295611

Personal Author:

Tippins, Sherill

Publication Date:

2014

Physical Description:

448 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

For more than a century, from its construction in the late 19th century to its current state of legal limbo in the early 21st century, New York's Chelsea Hotel has been a home, a refuge, an asylum, a cocoon for dozens of American and international artists, writers, poets, composers, film-makers, bohemians and assorted eccentrics. Over the years it has offered - crucially very cheap - shelter to, among many others: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur C. Clarke, Edie Sedgwick, Dylan Thomas, Mary McCarthy, Patti Smith, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Sherill Tippins has spent several years immersed in the Chelsea's rich, colourful and at times violent history, and the result is this book, which chronicles the extraordinary life of the hotel and the no less remarkable lives and deaths of those who passed through its doors.

Corporate Subject:

Chelsea Hotel -- History.

Subject Term:

Arts, American -- New York (State) -- New York -- 20th century.

Travel and Tourism.

Geographic Term:

Manhattan (New York, N.Y.) -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.

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647.94097471

Material Type

Book

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30116019463262

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Summary

The Chelsea Hotel, since its founding by a visionary French architect in 1884, has been an icon of American invention: a cultural dynamo and haven for the counterculture, all in one astonishing building. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House,delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well: why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists' community in the known world? Inside the Dream Palaceis the intimate and definitive story.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this wide-ranging history, literary biographer Tippins explores the Chelsea Hotel's role as a refuge for artists and eccentrics for over a century. Built in 1884 by a French architect, Philip Hubert, who had been deeply influenced by the utopian philosopher Charles Fourier, the Chelsea immediately became a center of counter-culture in New York City. Evolving and devolving through two world wars, the Great Depression, and ever-changing management, the Chelsea somehow managed to provide a haven for bohemians from around the world, even as the rooms were subdivided, the plumbing decayed, and pimps, junkies, and dealers roamed the halls. Tippins smoothly conveys the atmosphere at the Chelsea in its early days through her descriptions of Gilded Age luminaries like William Dean Howells, while she focuses on the hard-drinking Thomas Wolfe and the suave composer Virgil Thomson in her treatment of the Depression era. However, the prose comes fully alive as Tippins documents the shifting currents of New York bohemia in the decades after WWII. The list of luminaries who helped to create the Chelsea magic include Arthur Miller, Arthur C. Clarke, Edie Sedgwick, Harry Smith, Bob Dylan, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Kerouac, and many, many others-a veritable who's-who of American postwar artists. A fascinating account of how a single building in New York City nurtured a community of freaks, dreamers, and outcasts whose rejection of the status quo helped to transform it. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven. Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists' studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building's walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a "down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere." Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the "great advantage" to living there "was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually." No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book. A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Tippins continues her exploration of New York's creative synergy, begun in February House (2005), in this astute, star-studded chronicle of Manhattan's fabled Chelsea Hotel. Idealistic French architect Philip Hubert established the city's first home club associations, or cooperatives, and designed the Chelsea Association Building on Twenty-Third Street specifically to attract artists, musicians, and writers. The mammoth red-brick edifice did just that from its 1884 opening to its 2005 closing for renovations. Tippins charts the ups and downs of the Chelsea in sync with the booms and busts of the city as the hotel's rooms were subdivided, and its creative endeavors descended from poetry readings to porno films. Tippins tells riveting stories about such Chelsea residents as writers Edgar Lee Masters, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, and Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there. Jackson Pollock puked on the dining-room carpet. Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin met in an elevator. Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey filmed Chelsea Girls. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe flowered. Zealous, big-picture researcher Tippins not only tells compelling tales, she also weaves them into a strikingly fresh, lucid, and socially anchored history of New York's world-altering art movements. Though its future is uncertain, Tippins ensures that the Chelsea Hotel, dream palace and microcosm, will live on in our collective memory.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

"IT'S A SAD irony of New York life that over time, the fabled buildings and institutions that first attract us to the city fade into invisibility." So begins Sherill Tippins's thorough, if not groundbreaking, Hotel Chelsea history. For the past dozen or so years, the Chelsea has been raging against invisibility. Former guests and residents as different as Dee Dee Ramone, Abel Ferrara and Ethan Hawke have featured it in their work. Current residents have waged a very public battle with its new owner, the luxury hotel developer King & Grove. In anticipation of a potentially soulkilling renovation, two new books capture its lovably scuzzy spirit. One is an evocative coffee-table book by the photographer Victoria Cohen, HOTEL CHELSEA (Pointed Leaf Press, $95), which treats the oddly painted rooms' quirky mix of old and new furniture, worn carpeting and garish bedspreads as something like sacred relics. The other is Tippins's doorstop-hefty "Inside the Dream Palace," which aspires to tell the "definitive story." Welcome, tributes! The Chelsea deserves them all. The hotel has been, for more than a hundred years, a bastion of bohemianism and a clubhouse for self-destructive geniuses. Thanks to the apparently saintly Bard family's stewardship (which ended in 2007, when the board fired Stanley Bard as manager after 50 years on the job), artists, poets and none-or-all-of-the-aboves like Rene Ricard have found a home. Whatever was happening out in the city, inside the Chelsea there were parties, friendships, romances - and, in the time left over, the making of art, like Leonard Cohen's song "Chelsea Hotel #2" (covered incessantly, this year by Lana Del Rey), about his tryst with Janis Joplin. On the eclectic, seemingly endless list of creative activity there: Bob Dylan wrote lyrics for "Blonde on Blonde," Andy Warhol shot "Chelsea Girls" and Thomas Wolfe assembled "You Can't Go Home Again." Not for nothing does Tippins repeat a description of the Chelsea as "a veritable Ellis Island of the avant-garde." Serious about her mission, Tippins delivers a thoughtful, well-paced chronological account of the New York City landmark's "shabby caravansary." She synthesizes the many books on the subject into a century-long narrative, no mean feat. Her style is neither academic nor sensationalized, but boosterish: The Fugs were "shaking things up"; Andy Warhol created "a stunning new form of visual truth"; Bob Dylan was "a powerful force for change." Her measured tone, even when reporting about orgies, drugs and murders, gives her a quiet authority and the soothing vibe of shepherd to an acid trip. If there were a course in Chelsea Hotel-iana, this would be the textbook. On rare occasions, Tippins switches gears from mellow to irate, as when she talks about capitalism - claiming more than once, for instance, that the greatest crime in New York is having no money. She also writes animatedly, if convolutedly, about the esoteric. On the experimental filmmaker Harry Smith: "Smith's occult research had taught him that thought-forms produced by certain highly focused collaborations can and often do break free from their creators and continue on their own." (Her polite, credulous tone does not entertain the plausible notion that Smith was, to use a technical term, bonkers.) Tippins supports the theory that the hotel is in some way haunted: "I, too, experienced the commonly reported sense of the uncanny - a kind of residual energy left behind by past generations or, somehow, generated by the building itself." The strongest part of the book is the early section about the Chelsea's 1880s start as an association modeled on Charles Fourier's utopian principles. Fourier's intentional communities, each known as a "phalanx," were thought capable of creating a system of "perfect harmony" that would be "the next stage in human evolution." Tippins argues that the Chelsea, when functioning at its best, was effectively that: a revolutionary social experiment through which residents found "strength through diversity." As in her 2005 book "February House," about the improbable onetime Brooklyn dwelling of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and the Bowleses, Tippins suggests that a thoughtful mix of people and architecture can lead to great things. It was "built into the bones of the hotel," she writes earnestly, "that artists had the vision and the power to change the world." one might expect the book's vitality to grow as it moves toward the present, given the availability of firsthand sources. But Tippins continues to draw primarily from texts rather than people. Though she has said she spent six years on the book and she lists more than 50 interviewees in her acknowledgments, for every "interview with the author" in the endnotes there is a raft of referenced books like "In the Seventies," "Please Kill Me" and "Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman." It's deflating to come across what looks like a fresh bit of gossip, only to turn to the endnotes and discover the source was Hollywood.com. The lack of revelatory reporting would be understandable if Chelsea's veterans were all dead, or shy. But they're chatty, and they're everywhere. Ferrara's 2008 documentary, "Chelsea on the Rocks," had dozens of subjects, including Gaby Hoffmann (the Chelsea's answer to Eloise), as well as Dennis Hopper and Vito Acconci. An oral history of the Chelsea published in Vanity Fair in October quoted, among others, Gerard Malanga, William Ivey Long, Betsey Johnson, Eddie Izzard, Rufus Wainwright and R. Crumb, none of whom does it appear Tippins consulted. Also, why did Tippins not get better quotes from those she did talk to? Here's John Giorno on LSD experimentation: "It was very exciting." Patti Smith is listed as an interviewee, but the original material gleaned from her appears to be just five words, sourced as coming from "email correspondence with the author": "Hanging out with poets and rock stars 'was just life to us.'" Smith's memoir, "Just Kids," by contrast, is cited more than 50 times. Another well Tippins returns to again and again is Arthur Miller's memoir "Timebends." If only some of that Miller real estate had been spent on a few of the more obscure characters who have spent time there. Tippins makes only glancing mention, for example, of Elizabeth Hawes, the fashion designer and union organizer who wrote hilarious books like "Why Women Cry; Or, Wenches With Wrenches" and drank herself to death at the Chelsea in 1971. Tippins also mentions only in passing the routinely overlooked East Village musician Lee Crabtree, "a shy, freckle-faced pianist who'd played with the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders." The source for her account of his suicide at the Chelsea (and for Crabtree's shyness and freckles and band affiliations) is "Just Kids," which itself wasn't a primary account of his death. In other words, Tippins says that Smith says that the poet Anne Waldman told her that Crabtree jumped off the roof. More reporting could have prevented such games of telephone, and would have made "Inside the Dream Palace" a valuable work of history rather than a timely work of historical synthesis. ? INSIDE THE DREAM PALACE The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel By Sherill Tippins Illustrated. 457 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30. ADA CALHOUN, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is writing a book about the history of St. Marks Place.

Library Journal Review

Tippins (February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee Under One Roof in Wartime America) examines another fabled New York building. Intended by architect Philip Hubert in 1884 as a utopian communal living space, the Chelsea quickly filled with residents both rich and poor. The dramatis personae of inhabitants features scores of notables, including Virgil Thomson, Dylan Thomas, and Arthur Miller. They found the bohemian chic of an "artistic collective" to be irresistible. But as the hotel's fame grew, there were ominous signs of change. The arrival of performers such as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, and Sid Vicious and their fans saw a steady increase in drug use, crime, and even suspicious deaths, causing many of the longtime residents to flee. The author successfully charts the fascinating lineage of the once-celebrated hotel, still standing today, though a shadow of its former self, now facing yet another real estate developer with plans to transform it. VERDICT This is an exuberant tale of pop history about a New York landmark. While Tippins may be faulted for providing perhaps too much historical context, her spirited writing effectively illustrates the Chelsea as the unforgettable place it was. Recommended to pop culture enthusiasts, architecture specialists, and fans of celebrityhood.-Richard Drezen, Jersey City (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

For a young woman from a small Texas town -- a lifelong outsider who had drifted since she was eighteen from one bohemian scene to another -- life at the legendary Chelsea was a thrilling experience. Through some fluke, Janis had been assigned one of the smaller rooms initially, but once she'd had a chance to wander the corridors and step out onto a balcony overlooking the snow-covered city, she realized that this was where she belonged -- street noise, clanking heating pipes, and stained carpet notwithstanding. During those first weeks, she would write to her sister of the aura of history and magic that resonated through the halls of this "very famous literary type intellectual hotel," whose current population of hippies and musicians, artists and writers, superstars and regular working folks had grown so large that it had begun to spill over into the twelve-story Carteret building next door. Stanley Bard also felt that Janis had found a home here. Looking beyond her secondhand clothes and uncombed hair, he perceived a powerful life spirit -- a hard-working young woman with "good energy and focus." He said later that he regretted that she hadn't become a teacher, something she told him she'd once planned to be. He worried even then that this goodhearted Texas girl who'd strung the beads her ex-boyfriend Country Joe McDonald had worn for his performance at Monterey Pop -- on the same day she herself had stunned the audience with her no-holds-barred rendition of "Love Is Like a Ball 'n' Chain" -- wasn't prepared to handle the cutthroat Warhol crowd at the trendy new Max's Kansas City, even if "Janis," McDonald's tribute to her, was playing on the jukebox for all the hangers-on to hear. To some extent, he was right. On February 17, 1968, Joplin had earned ecstatic reviews with her gut-wrenching rendition of "Piece of My Heart" at the Anderson, and the concert was followed by a blast of publicity that promised a triumphant East Coast launch. But as recording sessions began for Big Brother and the Holding Company's first Columbia Records album, later to be named Cheap Thrills, the first week of March, the band learned that a quartermillion- dollar contract from a major record label didn't come without some strings attached. To play its best, Big Brother had always depended on its visceral connection with the audience. Now, there was no audience, and their producer, John Simon, was appalled by how poorly the musicians performed. Simon, with his perfect pitch, actually had to leave the studio when the band performed off-key or off the beat. Discussions about dumping Big Brother and getting Janis a professional backup band began at Columbia and in Grossman's office. The musicians, shocked by the criticism, began to turn their resentment against Joplin. The press attention she had received since their arrival in New York, including a photograph in the New York Times from which every band member but Janis had been cropped, convinced them that she was on a star trip and intended to leave them behind. This feeling of insecurity poisoned the air at the recording sessions and put Janis herself into a foul mood. At the Chelsea, she spent less time with the band and more time on her own, roaming the halls at three in the morning, feeling lonely and isolated, looking for some company and a drink. Someone else was keeping the same hours at the Chelsea that winter. Leonard Cohen had been through his own tribulations with Columbia over the previous year. By April 1967, after further coverage of his songs by Judy Collins and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cohen had done a few public singing performances and had even been offered a college tour in the fall. Months before, Columbia's John Hammond, famed discoverer of Bob Dylan as well as Count Basie and Aretha Franklin, had dropped in at the Chelsea to hear Cohen play "Suzanne," "The Stranger Song," and other tunes. "You've got it," he had announced before leaving, but it was not until the end of April that he was able to persuade the record company to take a chance on a poet-singer Cohen's age. Through the summer and fall of 1967, Cohen worked laboriously to lay down the songs for his first album, first with the legendary producer Bob Johnston, then with Hammond. It was a painful process; the chance to take time out to perform "Suzanne" at the Newport Folk Festival felt like being "released from jail." In Newport, Cohen met a fellow Canadian singer-songwriter, twenty-four-year-old Joni Mitchell, and when the festival was over, he took her back with him to the Chelsea Hotel. For a few months, they became an official item. Joni demanded a reading list from her poet-lover, and Leonard recommended Camus, García Lorca, and the I Ching. One day a limousine pulled up next to them, and Jimi Hendrix, in the limo's back seat, started talking to Joni; Cohen was pleased that Joni didn't jump into the limousine and run off with the charismatic guitarist, as Nico had once done in a similar situation. But in the end, Cohen's relationship with Mitchell developed into something more collegial than passionate. He quipped at one point that living with Joni was like "living with Beethoven." She was clearly on her own upward trajectory, and though they would remain friends beyond their summer romance, she couldn't resist dismissing him now and then as a "boudoir poet," less a composer than a "word man." In the wake of the romance, Cohen faced the hard reality of the recording process alone. In September, Hammond dropped out, and the project was put on hold for a month. Cohen, devastated by the prospect of having to start all over again, shut himself in his room for a week, smoking hash and seeing only his friends at the Chelsea. Then John Simon, Big Brother's future producer, was brought in to replace Hammond, and somehow the album was completed. Songs of Leonard Cohen, its back cover sporting the image of a Mexican saint like those seen in his neighborhood botánica, shipped in December of 1967. Cohen went on a brief promotional tour. Now he was back, roaming the Hotel Chelsea's halls again, his album having met with only limited success and the rights to "Suzanne" and two more of his best songs somehow lost to a music publisher along the way. By this point, as Cohen would tell a concert audience years later, he had become expert at operating the Chelsea's notoriously stubborn elevators. It was "one of the few technologies I really ever mastered," he said. "I walked in. Put my finger right on the button. No hesitation. Great sense of mastery in those days." One cold, dismal night, returning home from a solitary dinner at the Bronco Burger, he realized that the woman next to him in the elevator was Janis Joplin and that she was enjoying the ride as much as he was. He understood at once: with all the problems they had satisfying the demands of their record label, here was something both of them really knew how to do. Taking a deep breath, Cohen asked, "Are you looking for someone?" She said, "Yes, I'm looking for Kris Kristofferson." Kris Kristofferson? "Little lady, you're in luck," responded the silver-tongued poet. "I am Kris Kristofferson." Joplin's full-throated cackle at this remark made Cohen forget all about his record, his lost copyright, and the burger he was still struggling to digest. In no time, Canada's poet of pessimism found himself in an unmade bed with rock's new gypsy queen. The tryst would provide sweet if fleeting memories to this pair just beginning to perceive the price they would pay for the fame they had wished for. Too much thought and energy would be focused on "the money and the flesh" in the coming years. Well, that was all right, Joplin said, as Cohen recalled years later in his song "Chelsea Hotel No. 2." "We are ugly but we have the music." The Fillmore East's opening concert on March 8 was a whopping success, with people fighting to get in to watch Joplin belt out "Catch Me, Daddy" in a wash of psychedelic lights. By late spring, Janis was scheduled for photo shoots with Glamour and interviews with Life and Look. Soon, her portrait by Richard Avedon would appear in Vogue, where Richard Goldstein would describe her as "the most staggering leading woman in rock . . . she slinks like tar, scowls like war . . . clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave." As money started to roll in, Joplin lavished it on her friends, presiding over El Quijote dinner parties where Harry Smith and Peggy Biderman shared a plate of paella while Ginsberg compared notes on book royalties with Cohen and a bevy of adoring female fans looked on. Ginsberg, like Stanley Bard, found Janis to be "a very sensitive, beautiful person" and added her to the list of friends at the hotel whom he was likely to fetch for a confabulation in some room at any time of the night or day. But at El Quijote, the Spanish waiters observed the way she slugged Southern Comfort and loudly flirted with every man who walked by, and kept their opinions to themselves. Excerpted from Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel by Sherill Tippins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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