Of special interest to Hubert, a host of theaters had drifted to the district in the wake of the gentry’s migration uptown. On and around Twenty-Third Street, ladies and gentlemen of the city’s upper class could enjoy Shakespeare at Edwin Booth’s Temple of Dramatic Art, slapstick or melodrama at Henry Abbey’s Park Theatre, and French or German farces in the theaters of Lester Wallack and Augustin Daly; they could take their daughters to the exquisite Madison Square Theater, whose clergymen founders, the Mallory brothers, presented it as a bastion of “wholesome amusement.” Less savory entertainment was available at Koster and Bial’s German-style concert saloon; at the soon-to-be-completed Eden Musée wax museum; and, near the western end of the street, at Fisk and Gould’s old Grand Opera House, now presenting variety shows under an ever-changing series of producers.
This was surely the most tolerant, cosmopolitan, and varied social mix to be found anywhere in the United States. Immersing oneself in the Babel of moaning beggars and hand-organ men, society swells and streetwalkers, theatergoers and policemen of West Twenty-Third Street, one truly experienced what it meant to be a New Yorker. A cooperative residence planted here was likely to attract certain kinds of residents—a group whose “congenial tastes” sprang not from their similar wealth, cultural backgrounds, or education but from their shared tastes for novelty, social interaction, intellectual stimulation, and creative work.
Ordinarily, it would have been impossible to find a plot of land on this street that was large enough for the kind of cooperative that Hubert had in mind. But an old wound lay festering between two churches in the middle of the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, on the street’s south side—a gaping hole where the giant furniture empire conceived by Tweed bagman James Ingersoll had stood.
It had been a dozen years since Ingersoll had seen his dream die on the front page of the Times. Yet who could forget the drama of autumn 1871, when the chair-maker from the tenements, newly married into high society and owner of a Fifth Avenue mansion, barely managed to complete his cast-iron temple to the craftsman’s art before he was placed under arrest? Those who had attended Ingersoll’s trial could still recall the remarkable stoicism with which he had endured the spotlight. The newspapers rebuked him for his serene demeanor, demanding that he display some public regret. But Ingersoll had hardly blinked, despite his bewildered old father’s repeated cries that his boy was “square,” until it came time for the sentencing. Then, when the judge berated him for bringing disgrace to his young wife, the Bowery chair-maker broke down in tears. Watching from the gallery, one observer remarked to a friend, “To me, that little, good-looking, insignificant chap, is only a tool.”
In the years since, Tweed had died in prison, and Jim Fisk had been shot and killed at the Grand Central Hotel by his mistress’s new, younger lover. In 1875, Ingersoll was released early from Sing Sing in exchange for a full confession and financial restitution to the city rumored to be as high as one million dollars. Then, on a quiet Sunday evening in February of 1878, the Excelsior burned down. The fire, which began in a pile of lumber stored in the cellar, raced through the building and spread to the churches on either side, turning their steeples into columns of flame. As the conflagration sent one wall crashing to earth, then another, and finally the grand façade, the firemen struggled to hold back the hundreds of New Yorkers who packed the avenues watching the mammoth relic of the Tweed ring fall. Surely it was an act of divine retribution, many said.
Philip Hubert’s father, an idealist in the old French manner, had never been able to abide the rampant corruption he encountered in the cities of his adopted United States. Shortly before his death, old Colomb had donated the plans for a new city hall building to the town of Allegheny, Pennsylvania—only to receive a friendly offer from a city official to cut him in on the graft when it was built. Colomb was so offended that he refused to speak English ever again, and he died, having kept that promise, less than a year later. But Philip had a different nature—less idealistic, more focused on results. That year, 1883, Hubert arranged through intermediaries for the purchase of the seven lots belonging to Ingersoll as well as the townhouse facing Twenty-Second Street to the rear. In exchange, the one-time cabinetmaker received $175,000. Hubert also signed over to him an apartment in the cooperative and membership in the association.
After all, what good would it do to turn his back on Ingersoll, as his father would have done? Better to take this New York property, essentially stolen from the people, and return it to them in the form of a cooperative. Better to bring the sinner back into the fold. A corrupt society naturally corrupts the souls of those who live within it, Fourier had written. But when the environment is changed, the bonds of corruption are gradually loosened, and the original personality of the society returns. In Philip Hubert’s Chelsea Association Building, there would be all types of New Yorkers—the dark- and light-spirited, the shrewd and the innocent, the scarred and the pure. Every note on the keyboard had a tone to contribute; Ingersoll’s passion for beauty could be put to use decorating the Chelsea’s interior using the resources of the famed Pottier and Stymus, where he remained a silent partner.
The Association building, 175 feet wide and 86 feet deep (as wide as the Brook Farm phalanstery but twice as deep and nearly four times as high), would consist of eighty apartments, which was the minimum number of households prescribed by Fourier for an experimental phalanx. Fifty would be occupied by association members. The remaining thirty would be rented to outsiders, providing both a diverse circulating population and additional income that, when combined with rents from six of the top-floor art studios and from the ground-floor shops, would cover the building’s maintenance costs.
In the early stages, Fourier had written, seven-eighths of the members chosen for an association should be farmers and artisans, those who possessed the knowledge and experience needed to get a rural phalanx going. For this cooperative, on an island under massive construction, the closest equivalents were clearly the builders, contractors, and real estate developers then involved in the creative process of “growing” the city. It made sense, then, to create a central core for the Chelsea Association from a selection of these builders, who would literally construct and equip the Chelsea itself. As always, there were far more applicants for the home club than there were available openings, so finding suitable members was an easy matter.
In his prospectus for the building, Hubert was pleased to report that the Chelsea Association’s building committee—developers including George Moore Smith, Samuel Loudon, Robert Buchanan, Louis Harrington, Robert Darragh, and others with “intimate knowledge of various apartment houses in this city”—took special pride in overseeing every detail of construction of this home they themselves would occupy, using only the best materials and applying their craft “with the utmost fidelity.” They demonstrated their pride in the Chelsea’s new type of fireproof roof by affixing to it a bronze plaque with the name of its patent holder, Tobias New of Brooklyn, and in their fervor to set an example in terms of fireproofing, they even voted down Hubert’s plan to install great wooden beams in the lobby like those at the Hawthorne. It was clear to them all that the act of creating their own home had contributed to a greater sense of cohesion than any previous home club had enjoyed—a promising beginning for the kind of creative communal life that Hubert had in mind.
Once enough members with the knowledge and ability to take care of a phalanx’s material needs were assembled, Fourier had suggested, most of the remaining portion of its population should consist of scholars and artists, who could serve the community’s psychological and spiritual needs. The fifteen studios on the Chelsea’s top floor, each filled with light from north-facing windows ten feet square, ensured significant participation by artists, and a number of the city’s most promising young painters became association members or tenants. Set as the Chelsea was in the middle of the city’s arts district, it also drew the families of music or art students who would attend the nearb
y schools. Writers joined to take advantage of the Chelsea’s soundproof walls and inspiring views. And theater people active in the district, including the producer and impresario Henry E. Abbey and the actress Annie Russell, soon gravitated to its welcoming atmosphere.
The remaining cooperative apartments and rental units would be filled with a diverse collection of young professionals and their families, retired couples, government officials, titled aristocrats, young newlyweds, bachelors and men about town, elderly gentlemen with offbeat hobbies or young second wives, wealthy widows, and a cadre of thirty resident immigrant Irish and German servants available on demand—all overseen by a “regency,” as Fourier had also recommended, consisting of the Chelsea Association’s wealthiest and most knowledgeable members. This first board of directors—the well-known financier William C. Spencer; Andrew J. Campbell, a former president of the Merchants and Traders’ Exchange; the real estate developer Thomas C. Brunt; and Louis Harrington, president of the construction company that had installed the Chelsea’s roof—would guide the cooperative through its early years until a more democratic process became practical.
A population of such social diversity had never before lived under a single roof in New York. But a variety of backgrounds alone did not satisfy Hubert’s requirements for the Chelsea. To ensure as varied as possible an economic mix, he drew up plans for a range of apartment sizes and prices on each residential floor. Sweeping eight- to twelve-room flats, wrapping around each side of the building, with four or more bedrooms, libraries and salons, and full kitchens and pantries, would accommodate the wealthiest residents. Next to these, the architect placed more modest two- and three-bedroom apartments with well-proportioned parlors and charming bay windows or small front balconies, suitable for family life. Toward the building’s center, near the elevators, he designed simple four-room bachelors’ or spinsters’ quarters without kitchens that cost less than the working-class apartments of two years before. This range of sizes (from approximately 800 to 3,000 square feet) and prices (family apartments cost from $7,000 to $12,000, rentals from $41.67 to $250 per month) was unheard-of in a city where economic status effectively separated one class of citizen from another. Hubert saw to it, too, that owners and renters shared each floor to extend the mix of residents even further.
Other aspects of the building were designed to facilitate the alternating rhythms of communal and private spaces that Fourier deemed necessary for a creative and productive life. The roof promenade, the dining rooms, the frescoed sitting room for the women and the billiards room for the men, corridors eight feet wide where residents could meet and linger comfortably in conversation, and a broad stairway serving as a kind of interior public street, all helped generate an atmosphere of conviviality. Yet ample provision had been made for privacy as well: the thick walls and soundproof floors made the apartments more like separate houses than ordinary New York flats, and dumbwaiters provided meals from the kitchen when residents wished to be alone.
As always, Hubert’s work conveyed a kind of metaphorical power: the lobby fireplace with its carved figures served as a kind of campfire about which neighbors could gather, and the light-flooded staircase, adorned with flowers, served as a symbolic link between the social world at ground level and the solitary, spiritual life above. Inside the apartments, high ceilings and generous proportions instilled a sense of expansiveness and calm in the residents, yet curved walls and hidden recesses subverted this sensation, instilling a sense of mystery as well.
Hubert had done what he could to build a framework in which to contain and concentrate the special variety and energy of this city. But the establishment of a residential cooperative, no matter how creative and no matter how innovative, was not sufficient for the purpose he had in mind. From the beginning of his life in New York, Hubert had dreamed of establishing a cooperative theater—a space to be used not for commercial entertainment, like the minstrel shows and farces filling the theaters of the Chelsea district, but for amateur writers and performers. In such a venue, New Yorkers could begin to present their own stories and examine their own lives, collaborating with professionals at times, in much the same way Fourier had planned for his phalanxes.
It was the artists’ job, in fact, to seek out the words and images that could unite a population, the Fourierists believed. As millers turned grain into flour, so poets and composers transformed the currents of thought and feeling passing through a population into tangible narratives, allowing communities to understand themselves. Through this shared experience, a disparate group became a unified phalanx, strengthened and ready to evolve.
In any case, a theater would provide welcome distraction for Hubert, whose beloved wife, Cornelia, had recently died, and for his actress-daughter, Marie. By the spring of 1884, Hubert had convinced twelve wealthy colleagues to purchase shares in a small theater on Fourth Avenue between West Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Streets, fewer than four blocks from the Chelsea. In mid-May, as the Chelsea Association Building entered its final stages of construction, Hubert began work on the Lyceum.
The theater’s simple style—wood paneling with silver inlay, dark red carpet, and silk-lined walls—communicated Hubert’s vision for an intimate forum for creative New Yorkers. And it soon drew the attention of a quartet of young stage professionals employed at the family-friendly Madison Square. Franklin Sargent, a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire and former elocution teacher at Harvard; Gustave Frohman, son of a dry-goods peddler, in charge of organizing national tours for the Madison Square Theater’s more successful plays; David Belasco, a playwright and director recently arrived from San Francisco; and the fiery dramatist and handsome leading man Steele MacKaye had long talked of the need to create a forum for realistic plays about real American life, which was just what Hubert envisioned. In midsummer, they abandoned their former employers en masse to staff Hubert’s Lyceum. Hubert was soon persuaded to attach to the theater a professional drama school—the first of its kind in the country—whose students, trained in the natural style of the Delsarte method taught in Paris, could take part in the professional plays.
Their goal was to create “a remarkable ensemble, with the dual aim of social community as well as the theatre proper,” Frohman told reporters. As would-be actors from all over the country flocked to the school, many attracted by the offer of a free education for those who couldn’t afford to pay, Hubert turned his attention back to the Chelsea Association Building, now complete in all but its final decorative touches.
From the beginning, the firm of Pottier and Stymus had shown a special ability to express each client’s personal philosophy or vision, from the exotic reception rooms of the Vanderbilts to the gentleman’s libraries of Leland Stanford. Now, under Ingersoll’s direction, the firm applied its talents toward the expression of the American value of strength through diversity—the central, democratic ideal of Hubert’s Chelsea Association. Upstairs, individuality was celebrated in the form of custom-designed apartments for all association members: fireplace styles ranged from baroque white marble to late Gothic woodwork, and tile choices varied from Moorish mosaic to hand-molded William Morris to whimsical Minton creations in blue and white. Downstairs, the joys of community were expressed in the form of the laughing gargoyles and gilded fleurs-de-lis decorating the shared dining rooms and in the harmonizing images of nature depicted in etched-glass panels, stained-glass transoms, and the enormous Hudson River School paintings on the walls. Most delightful of all, and perhaps most significant, were the American sunflowers worked into the designs of the wrought-iron balconies—a response, perhaps, to Fourier’s own symbol of the artist in civilization, the flower known as the crown imperial, which had its blossoms hidden beneath its leaves. The flowers at the Chelsea expressed Hubert’s wish that the American artists in his cooperative hold their petals up to the sky.
Together, all of these elements coalesced in a grand collage reflecting the mosaic of individuals who would soon move among them. Separately, no
single feature—and perhaps none of the individuals—possessed any particular power. But together, they had the ability to nurture creativity and unfettered imagination. In its physical as well as its human design, the Chelsea Association Building, created by one of New York’s greatest idealists and built on land owned by one of its most notorious criminals, stood as a concrete demonstration of Fourier’s conviction that only in diversity could a society thrive—but that diversity had to be contained in a reliable structure for all voices to join in a fully harmonic song.
If an architect’s challenge is to communicate truth without words, Hubert had succeeded at the task. Within weeks of the building’s completion, the utopian-minded architectural critic David Goodman Croly declared that the Chelsea demonstrated a fundamental change as New Yorkers became “more capable of organization, more sociable, more gregarious than before.” An anonymous editorialist for the New York Sun was inspired by the Chelsea to call for more architects to “build tremendous stairs for [the] brave one hundred; splendid cities with pillars and arcades; front doors as wide as those of a cathedral and as rich in carved tracery,” because, after all, “is not this what architects have long been looking for, this material and spiritual need for a new kind of building?” The Chelsea and other “living temples of humanity” offered limitless possibilities for improving urban life, concluded the writer. “We are clearly in the beginning of a new era.”
On August 17, 1884—the day the Times reported the arrest of Paula, mysterious story spinner of the downtown slums—Hubert signed over control of his Lyceum theater to Gustave Frohman, who would soon marry Hubert’s daughter, Marie. With the Chelsea nearly complete, it was time to prepare for the arrival of its founding residents. It was hard not to wish that Paula really could stay “with friends” at the Chelsea as she had claimed, but as Fourier had written, and as Greeley had concurred, it was impractical to open the doors to these neediest outsiders until the community had had time to establish itself. Who knew if she would ever be allowed inside? Hubert was no oracle. But as an architect, he had placed a frame around a space, arranged patterns to inspire certain thoughts, and pointed to the correspondences that could, if perceived, nourish growth.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 5