Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea HotelSherillTippins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Abstract

Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel S her ill Tippins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.Built between 1883 and 1885, the Chelsea Hotel has served as a center for artistic and creative activity, hosting luminaries such as Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, and Allen Ginsberg. Sherill Tippins's exhaustively researched work is not just a celebratory roll-call of famous faces, as she demonstrates how the various periods in the hotel's checkered career offer a microcosm of American history.The hotel was designed by French emigre Philip Hubert in grand style, at the time the largest residential structure in the history of New York. In addition to its elegantly proportioned rooms and ornate lobbies, it boasted every conceivable modern amenity-pressurized steam for cooking, speaking tubes for easy communication, a dumb-waiter for room service. His approach to designing the hotel was highly influenced by the utopian philosopher Charles Fourier, who believed that human beings should be given the chance to pursue their interests unimpeded, so as to create a synergetic music of humanity spurring the population forward to spiritual and social evolution (39). In architectural terms, Fourier recommended that buildings should be created to house self-contained communities, or phalanxes, whose members could mingle freely, share intellectual interests, and divide domestic duties. Such experiments had already been attempted in mid-nineteenth century America: Brook Farm was established by a group of New England transcendentalists, what Nathaniel Hawthorne described as delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor (51). Hubert's building was praised by critics for the way in which it promoted a similar feeling of community; it was likened to a living temple of humanity offering limitless possibilities for improving urban life (66). At a time when America was undergoing profound social and economic change, the Chelsea offered a utopian vision of the future. It was hardly surprising that major figures such as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain chose to reside there.In spite of Hubert's expectations, the hotel at the end of the nineteenth century was largely patronized by the affluent middle class with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piquesongs [and] tinkling rhymes (92). Within four decades, the clientele had become far more cosmopolitan. This was due partly to economic reasons: the hotel was bankrupted as a result of the 1893 and the 1903 recessions, forcing the directors to transform it into a residential hotel. By the 1920s, the hotel's management had passed into the hands of the Knott Corporation, which thoroughly modernized the building by subdividing many of the original apartments, closing the private dining room, and creating more budget-priced facilities. Many creative artists came to live and work there, including novelists Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson and painter Arthur B. Davies. By now, the Chelsea served as a lasting reminder of the old sweet things of the Victorian era, an antidote to the hard-boiled efficiency and commercialism of the Depression and beyond (138). Within its walls, artists could cultivate a fulfilling and productive existence in private. The Chelsea helped to nurture the Federal Art Project and the Federal Theatre Project, two New Deal initiatives that offered new forms of community for everyone, whether rich or poor.Within two decades, the hotel had new owners, a syndicate of Hungarians headed by David Bard and Frank Amigo. The order of the late nineteenth century had been replaced by a more chaotic environment; the hotel had become shabby, linoleum was laid over marble, and cheap paint had been slapped on the walls. The clientele now included bookies and office clerks, attorneys and insurance executives. …