Review by New York Times 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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 8, 2013]
Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
