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

by Sherill Tippins

  The stories that popped up were bizarre. First came a stark account, dated 1884, of a tenement-slum girl who was dispatched to the Bellevue insane asylum after she claimed she lived at the glorious new Chelsea; this was followed by a passionate nineteenth-century tribute to the building as a “living temple of humanity” destined to meet New Yorkers’ “spiritual” as well as practical needs. A loving reminiscence of the days when hansom cabs delivered the town’s most beautiful women and their top-hatted escorts to the Chelsea for pre-opera dinners gave way to a report on a Hungarian artist who, after being robbed on the subway, checked into the Chelsea and shot himself in the head. At the Chelsea, I read, Isadora Duncan danced for her friends at private parties. At the Chelsea, a nineteenth-century playboy was caught philandering with both a handsome young barkeep and the barkeep’s wife. And at the Chelsea, the wife of a touring concert pianist cut off her hand with a pair of shears, left it behind for her young daughter to find, and leaped from a fifth-floor window to her death.

  Well, that was something, I said to myself, as the announcement that the library was closing brought me back to the present. Without doubt, the stories were intriguing. But the Chelsea still didn’t seem the best place for an elderly woman from Brighton to spend her last days. As for me, I had a deadline. I packed my bag and headed home.

  In the end, it took a lightning bolt, literally, to make the Chelsea visible to me again. The flash came in the midst of a sudden downpour one summer evening as I leaped over a puddle at the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Seventh Avenue. The forked flash of light drew my gaze upward in time to catch a split-second image of the Chelsea in all its Gothic glory silhouetted against a storm-roiled Manhattan sky. Atop its roof, full-grown trees waved their branches in the wind like women waving handkerchiefs in distress. It was an extravagant moment, but it did the trick. For the first time in decades, I actually stopped—in the middle of the street—and saw the Chelsea Hotel.

  How did that building get there? I wondered as a car honked and I hurried on. What was a bohemian headquarters like this doing lodged in the heart of the world’s most capitalist city? Who in the 1880s had thought to build an oversize palace for artists at a time when American writers and painters were socially on a par with tailors and parlor maids? And what had kept it going as a creative nexus for a hundred and twenty-five years? From all appearances, the Chelsea had lurched forward by lucky accidents of recession-lowered prices, rent-stabilization laws, and unusually benign management. But as I knew from past research, successful communities don’t just happen; the economic, social, and environmental conditions have to be planned and carefully maintained. Who had made these plans for the Chelsea? What had been the designer’s ultimate goal? And why had no one asked these questions before?

  Compelled to look for answers, I set aside other projects and began to dig beneath the time-hardened crust of Chelsea Hotel anecdote and legend. Through serendipity and researcher’s luck, I discovered a story long buried beneath the layers of New York history—a forgotten dream of community and cultural ambition that originated in revolutionary France, came to America before the Civil War, and was realized on Twenty-Third Street in the midst of the Gilded Age. It was a story involving utopian theorists and graft-hungry politicians, Brook Farm transcendentalists and immigrant-labor activists, gentlemen dabblers in paint and words and half-literate outcasts from the American West.

  The origins of the Chelsea Hotel took me far beyond the standard versions of New York’s history. I delved deeper, and the year I had expected to spend researching its history stretched to two years, then three and four. At times, as I immersed myself in stories of vagrants and countesses, anarchists and poets, ghosts and cadavers, I recalled the words of Chelsea denizen Alice Davis, Edgar Lee Masters’s mistress, who told a reporter, “This saga will never be written . . . The Chelsea Hotel is an 11-volume work!” But the journey was worth taking. In the history of the Chelsea, I found an alternative story of America—a subversive tale suppressed and erased with each successive era, only to emerge again every time. The Chelsea’s world survives because it exists for the most part not in New York but in the imaginations of those who have helped create it. Now, approaching the corner at Seventh Avenue where the hotel first commanded my attention years ago, I pause to take in the magnificent red-brick façade with its wrought-iron balconies, and I wonder how I could ever have ignored this cultural dynamo that has worked for more than a century, with varying degrees of success, to generate art and ideas capable of changing the world. As the Chelsea endures another crisis in a series that seems unending—this one a dispute following its sale to a New York real estate developer over whether it will be emptied of residents and become just another overpriced boutique hotel—the need to highlight its origins and significance seems more important than ever. The richness of imagination and experience retained within this building’s walls—the product of more than a century of friction between the hotel’s inner culture and the outside world—is like nothing else on the planet. Now, at this critical moment in its history—and our own—it is time to see the Chelsea anew.

  1

  The Chelsea Association

  Once in about every generation, attention is called to our social system . . . A class of men . . . unite to condemn the whole structure . . . The object is not destructive, but beneficent. Twenty-five years ago an attempt was made in most of the northern States. There are signs that another is about to be made.

  —N. C. MEEKER,

  New York Tribune, November 3, 1866

  A PERFORMER COULD NOT find a better stage in New York this sweltering night in August of 1884 than the sidewalk of West Tenth Street near the river, in one of the city’s worst downtown slums. A proscenium arch of grime-covered tenements and fluttering valances of laundry framed a set of ash barrels and garbage piles. Sparks from the Sixth Avenue elevated trains provided illumination, and clattering horses and clanging streetcars added sound effects. Potential audiences were everywhere: the factory girls and tailors’ assistants strolling Sixth Avenue, the Irish toughs stumbling out of the gaslit saloons, exhausted mothers roosting on the stoops with their infants, and entire families looking down from the cheap seats on the tenement roofs where they spent their summer nights.

  Every day, girls like Paula arrived in the city, missed their connections with families or fiancés, and ended up on streets like these. Just another lost soul, with her muddy hem and empty purse, the nineteen-year-old ordinarily would have passed invisibly through the crowd as she drifted west toward the river’s black void. But something about her straight-backed posture, about the peculiar fixed quality of her expression, alerted the street urchins that here was a diva preparing to perform. They left their games and trailed her in a taunting chorus until, at the corner of Bleecker, she spotted her leading man: a fresh-faced young policeman in a new uniform with shiny brass buttons. Drawing his gaze with her wide-eyed stare, Paula put a hand to her throat and, with a single small cry, slid to the ground as though sinking into the sea.

  Before, she had been invisible, but now she was seen. “Look! Look!” a boy shouted. “She had a fit, can’t you see?” People came running from all directions; the tenement windows filled with spectators, some of whom had rushed half-clothed from their beds to feast their eyes on the tragic sight. Down on the sidewalk, those at the front of the crowd twisted their heads to shout “Quit shoving!” at the ones scuffling in the rear. Then the young officer pushed through, his helmet towering above the multitude of black caps. Everyone cheered as he picked up the limp body, and they followed along as he carried the woman several blocks to the Charles Street police station. To the crowd’s satisfaction, the station-house surgeon called an ambulance and dispatched the pretty young victim to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where the nuns would no doubt give her a basement cot for the night. It was a well-done performance: a heroine rescued, a young officer ennobled, and the Church waiting in the wings to perform its proper charitable role. The audie
nce dispersed in a cheerful mood, as if they themselves had been saved.

  That would have been the end of it if not for the arrival of a young New York Times reporter who had learned of Paula’s performance from the police wire at the press office on Mulberry Street. He had recognized her at once from the wire’s description, having previously watched her hoodwink free lodging out of hospital officials from Long Island to the East River. When the reporter had first encountered her, in the chill halls of Bellevue’s insane pavilion, the girl identified herself as Pauline Esperanza Bolonda, but at another time, she gave the name Olga Helena Jesuriech, and at another, Frederica S. Jerome. Now, on the reporter’s arrival at St. Vincent’s, he was informed by the softhearted chief surgeon that the woman was the well-born “Frances Stevens of Switzerland,” newly arrived in this country and staying with friends on Twenty-Third Street—not just another homeless drifter hoping to avoid a night in a back alley or hallway squat.

  Nonsense, scoffed the journalist. This “pretty and mysterious fable coiner” had no friends, no family, no proper employment. As she feigned unconsciousness on her cot, the reporter opened her purse and proved that she possessed not a cent. Furthermore, for the record, the address she had given on West Twenty-Third Street was the Chelsea Association Building, which was not yet finished—clearly, “Frances Stevens” could not be a resident there. She was a fantasist, a liar. Everyone knew the destiny of girls like this—a quick descent from Bowery dancehall to Thompson Street brothel to opium addiction and an early grave.

  Better to withhold pity and allow fate to take its course—as it did the next day when the exhausted teenager, driven to distraction by a reporter determined to squeeze out of her plight one more story for the Sunday news, fled to a Second Avenue orphanage; threatened suicide if she did not get protection; and was promptly arrested and transported first to Bellevue and then to the Blackwell’s Island insane asylum, an institution from which few women ever returned. She had no money—the only crime in this city for which there was no appeal—and so her next performance would likely take place on a medical-school dissecting table or in Potter’s Field.

  “PAULA LOCKED UP; the Wanderer of Many Names Arrested as a Vagrant” read the headline of the brief report in the Sunday New York Times. The architect Philip Hubert would hardly have chosen this story to introduce his Chelsea Association Building. If, as some said, one could judge the state of a society by its treatment of women, this city had much to answer for. Standing on the Chelsea’s roof, a hundred and fifty feet above West Twenty-Third Street, the well-dressed Frenchman could easily pick out the Lower East Side slum from whose orphanage the young woman had been hauled away. It was difficult, surrounded up here by summer sunlight and a fresh Atlantic breeze, to imagine how despairing she must have felt as she searched those streets for shelter.

  The fifty-four-year-old architect could sympathize. Through a fluke of circumstance, he too had once been homeless for a time. At age fourteen, he had left his family home near Paris for an independent life and a job at an ironworks near the coast of France. Unable to afford a room on his pay of four sous per day, he had been forced to pitch a hammock in the woods outside town. Luckily, he was discovered by a local priest who then helped him find housing and even volunteered to tutor him privately for the next two years. If not for that priest and his magnificent library, Hubert might not be here, forty years later, a highly respected architect with three grown children—his youngest a girl near Paula’s age. Still, he knew what it was like to live on bread and water. The experience of hunger makes brothers of a surprising variety of people.

  Hubert was proud of this building, his newest home club and now the largest residential structure in the city of New York. He looked forward to seeing it fill with the eighty families he and his partners had chosen to create a life together under its roof. For more than a year, passersby in the district had watched the Chelsea Association Building’s iron beams rise from cellars thirty feet deep, had seen its façade of Philadelphia pressed brick expand east and west across seven city lots. Horizontal bands of white stone gave its upper floors a festive appearance, while iron balconies with balusters wrought into the shapes of sunflowers added charm to the lower floors. But though its beauty inspired admiration, its sheer size sparked some anxiety in this city of brownstones that had seen its first apartment building, aside from the slum tenements, only a decade before. Exaggerated headlines like the New York Tribune’s “Two Hundred Feet in the Air: A Thousand People under One Roof” played to public fears of fire, falling elevators, and the spread of disease. There were other fears too: that the forced intimacy of Parisian-style apartment living might lead the residents to looser moral standards, or, even worse, that the apartment-dwellers might be mistaken for the lower-class types in the rooming houses downtown. In a society lacking the Old World’s clear, traditional class divisions, New Yorkers relied on their private brownstones “to guard their dearly-cherished state of exaltation,” as Hubert had archly noted in a recent brochure. Yet, with real estate prices rising astronomically, many New Yorkers had to choose between apartment living and exile.

  Hubert had done his best to allay all these fears. Choosing a fashionable mix of Victorian Gothic and Queen Anne styles, he had festooned his building with cheerful clusters of asymmetrical peaked roofs, dormer windows, and red-brick chimneys. To address concerns about fire, he had separated apartments with cement-filled brick walls three feet thick and had sheathed the iron beams between floors with fireproof plaster, making it almost impossible for flames to spread from one residence to the next. There was no reason to fear the state-of-the-art elevators, designed by the Otis Company. And the Chelsea boasted every conceivable modern amenity as well: pressurized steam for cooking, speaking tubes for easy communication, a dumbwaiter for room service, eighteen hundred electric lights in addition to traditional gas jets, and even a telephone in the manager’s office for residents’ use.

  But Hubert hoped that, beyond issues of safety and comfort, new residents would appreciate the integrity of the building’s design. From the street’s broad sidewalk, they would enter a lodge-like reception hall, tastefully finished in mahogany wainscoting and white marble floors, with a carved fireplace to the left and an elegant ladies’ sitting room through arched doors on the right. At the center of the lobby, a brass and marble staircase adorned with bronzed-iron passionflowers wound up ten stories to an enormous skylight, through which sunlight tumbled to the ground floor. To the rear of that floor, behind the staircase, Hubert had installed three linked private dining rooms for the residents’ use, with a large kitchen that also served a public café accessible from the street. A basement barbershop and billiards parlor had been provided for the men. Behind these were the wine cellar, butcher shop, and laundry and coal rooms. An underground tunnel led to an annexed townhouse on Twenty-Second Street, through which deliverymen and servants could enter and leave the building unseen by residents.

  But it was the roof, Hubert suspected, that would most please the occupants of the Chelsea’s apartments and top-floor artist’s studios. Here, high above the dust and noise of the growing city, he had created a pleasure park for the residents’ private use. A brick-paved promenade stretched a hundred and seventy-five feet east to west across the building’s rear half, soon to be furnished with benches and awnings to provide relief from the summer sun. The peaked roofs of a staggered row of apartment-studio duplexes jutted through the roof’s center section, each entrance marked by a small private garden, adding the charming look of a small village to the space. And at the front of the building, atop the Chelsea’s central tower, stood an enormous slate-roofed pyramid with its own private garden that would serve as a clinic where residents could recuperate from illness among friends and family.

  It was easy to imagine inhabitants of the Chelsea gathering here to attend concerts under stars undimmed by the new electric streetlamps on Broadway or to listen to poetry recitations as the sun set behind the river on s
ummer evenings. Gazing down, they could trace the city’s expansion up the island of Manhattan in successive waves of prosperity—northward from the crooked waterfront streets of the original Dutch West India Company settlement to the proper British townhouses near Bowling Green, past the proud Greek Revival homes built with Erie Canal profits around Greenwich Village’s Washington Square, and finally to the aristocratic mansions of Gramercy Park and Union Square that marked the city’s emergence as chief conduit between Europe and the nation’s interior.

  These latter waves of development coincided, as it happened, with critical periods in Hubert’s own past. In 1830, as the agrarian Greenwich Village was absorbed and transformed by the encroaching city, Hubert was “christened on the barricades” of the July Revolution in Paris, where his architect father, Colomb Gengembre, had joined with other young technocrats to force the monarchist King Charles X from his throne. Having succeeded in replacing Charles with the more liberal-minded Louis Philippe, the group set to work through the years of Philip’s early childhood to rebuild French society in line with the writings of the utopian philosopher Charles Fourier. These writings shaped Philip’s life—and the Chelsea.

  At first glance, Fourier seemed an odd choice of champion for this coterie of sophisticated, intellectual Frenchmen. A lifelong eccentric left nearly penniless by his provincial merchant-father, Fourier barely managed to support himself on a municipal clerk’s salary, and his opinionated, cantankerous personality gained him enemies wherever he lived. Yet as a writer, Fourier demonstrated an exceptional gift for conveying both the horrors of life in the “stinking, close and ill-built” towns of early industrial France and the wonders of his vision for a liberated, creative, and productive new world.