Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel
Sherill Tippins, 2013
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544334472
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Sherill Tippins moved to New York from Austin, Texas, at the age of twenty-two to pursue a career as a screenwriter and author. Ten years later, having settled with her husband and two children in Brooklyn Heights, a quiet neighborhood overlooking Manhattan at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, she began volunteering for a neighborhood meal-delivery program to the elderly and infirm. It was from one of these neighbors that she first heard of the extraordinary experiment in communal living—involving a British poet, a southern novelist, one of the world's great opera composers, and a celebrated stripper—that had taken place sixty years earlier just a few blocks from her home.
Her fascination with the house and its residents prompted her to begin collecting facts and anecdotes about their shared life in Brooklyn, and eventually to recreate their experience in February House, published in 2005.
Tippins' second work, published in 2013, tells the story of a century's worth of creative interaction and raucous living—stretching over the decades from Sarah Bernhardt to O. Henry, from Thomas Wolfe to Jackson Pollock, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and beyond—all set in New York's famous (and infamous) Victorian-era edifice the Chelsea Hotel. (From the publsiher.)
Book Reviews
Tippins’s doorstop-hefty Inside the Dream Palace...aspires to tell the "definitive story" [of the Chelsea Hotel].... 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.... 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.... More reporting...would have made Inside the Dream Palace a valuable work of history rather than a timely work of historical synthesis.
Ada Calhoun - New York Times
An inspired investigation into the utopian spirit of the Chelsea Hotel.
Elle
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
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...the Chelsea immediately became a center of counter-culture in New York City.... 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
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
Library Journal
(Starred 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
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.... 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.
Kirkus Reviews
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