Synopses & Reviews
The next best thing to having a room key to the Chelsea Hotel during each of its famous — and infamous — decades.
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 John Sloan, Edgar Lee Masters, 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 Palace is the intimate and definitive story.
Today the Chelsea stands poised in limbo between two futures: Will this symbol of New York's artistic invention be converted to a profit-driven business catering to the top one percent? Or will the Chelsea be given a rebirth through painstaking effort by the community that loves it? Set against these two competing possibilities, Inside the Dream Palace could not be more fascinating or timely.
Review
"An inspired investigation into the utopian spirit of the Chelsea Hotel." ELLE
Review
"Cool hunters will appreciate Sherill Tippins's Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel, a social history of the city's sanctuary for postwar artists and It girls."
Vogue
Review
"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."
Booklist, starred
Review
"A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven....A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture."
Kirkus
Review
"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."
Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
The history of New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel, where artists of all stripes, legends themselves, have lived and loved and worked for more than a century.
About the Author
Sherill Tippins is the author of 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. She lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Illustrations ix Introduction xiii
chapter one
The Chelsea Association 1
chatper two
The Coast of Bohemia 33
chatper three
Four Saints in Three Acts 57
chatper four
Howl 97
chatper five
After the Fall 136
chatper six
A Strange Dream 171
chatper seven
The Price 215
chatper eight
Naked Lunch 258
chatper nine
Mahagonny 301
Epilogue: Second Life 341
Appendix: Cost Equivalencies 349
Authors Note and Acknowledgments 353
Notes 356
Selected Bibliography 421
Index 435