Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel - Hardcover

Tippins, Sherill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618726349 ISBN 13: 9780618726349

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

'It's where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, Arthur Miller hid from Marilyn Monroe and Sid killed Nancy. A new book lifts the lid on the Chelsea hotel, where scandal lurked behind every door' Mail on Sunday

'Tippins leads us on a vivid, informed and entertaining ramble through the history of New York's nonconformist and artistic classes: from political malcontents, the literary avant-garde and the countercultural upheavals of the fifties and sixties. There are six degrees of separation that connect Mark Twain to Abbie Hoffman, Arthur Miller to Andy Warhol' Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph

'Though Tippins has a hearty appetite for gossip, she underpins the life of the Chelsea with the social history of its times. The hotel's fortunes rose and fell with the economy of the city and her salty stories of hope, heroin, heartbreak and heroism revive the Chelsea's heartbeat' The Times

'An unputdownable eulogy to 23rd Street's infamous Chelsea Hotel'

'Not just a biography of a building, it amounts to an alternative history of 20th-century culture' --The Spectator

From the Back Cover:

"New York, the greatest city in the world, has been a magnet for bohemians since it was founded, and the Chelsea Hotel has been Bohemia's home address for more than a century. Sherill Tippins captures the mad magic of this storied building. She has written a history, not just of a hotel, but of a dream: the dream that art can change the world. Her serene and nonjudgmental eye gives coherence and shape to a story that resists any conventional frame. The Chelsea has had its high points and low, supreme artistic achievements and drug-addled suicides, sometimes in the same room. Tippins is an indispensable urban historian; her book is a guide to the lofty aspirations and crashing disappointments of America's artistic avant-garde over the last century and a half. An unforgettable read." —Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, New York Public Theater

"The Chelsea Hotel is so much more than the place where Sid Vicious may or may not have killed his girlfriend; it was a social experiment turned incubator for creativity. It was home for the artists and weirdos that made this city so interesting—famous, infamous, and everything in between. Sherill Tippins has done a masterful job of condensing a history that could be volumes long into a book that’s enthralling, enlightening, and understandably wistful." —Judy McGuire, author of The Official Book of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Lists

"Not only essential to the understanding of this crucial New York City—and therefore American—cultural landmark but as majestic and populous as the edifice itself, and completely entertaining." —Daniel Menaker, author of My Mistake: A Memoir

"An amazing history of not only the Chelsea Hotel but New York City itself. Thank you, Sherill Tippins, for this exciting story of how a building became a community and went on to be a legend. Inside the Dream Palace reads like the best fiction and never ever slows down from beginning to end." —Country Joe McDonald

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0618726349
• ISBN 13: 9780618726349
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 457