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.
