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vcmwI spent a fair amount of time on the bus last week reading Inside the Dream Palace, by Sherill Tippins. The book is a history of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City: the building itself, the residents, and the artistic communities that those residents participated in. The time period covered is roughly mid-1800s to the present, with the heaviest coverage being of the 1930s-1970s. Great as research fodder without being entirely satisfying as standalone history. I enjoyed the book and found it quite readable, but when I sit down to try and review it I am just all niggles and doubts.
I think how much someone likes this book will depend a lot on their general knowledge of New York cultural history and the interest they have in the specific people who get profiled most heavily in the text. There's quite a bit of stuff that's interesting in here about people like Stephen Crane, Brendan Behan, the Beat poets, and rock musicians of the 60s, and 70s. I'm not sure how effective the gossip would be for people who aren't familiar with the artists discussed, but if a reader sat down with youtube/google and pulled up musicians and artists as they were mentioned it might be a very fun experience.
Complaints, niggly thoughts, and personal reflections:
I'm always happy to read about boys kissing other boys, but... given how many men in the book were explicitly marked out as homosexual or bisexual by the text, I was very disappointed in how few women were marked out as lesbian or bisexual. Either the Chelsea Hotel was home to very few queer women or the text has a serious imbalance there. It could easily just be a case of... general erasure of queer women in available texts being higher than erasure of queer men, and the author not having a reason to dig into that and question it? But as a queer person it irked me.
There's an opening chapter that talks about NYC in the second half of the 1800s, the gilded age and some of the social movements and communal living experiments of the time and how those movements influenced the developers of the building. I really enjoyed that chapter. I was hoping for more of that throughout the text, and I didn't feel like it quite continued at that level.
The book seemed sympathetic to labor movements, unions, and other left-leaning organizations, but there were some weird narrative pronouncements about historical change that felt very odd to me, and I couldn't tell if they were narrative judgements by the text/author or reporting of the attitudes held by the people the author was talking about.
I'm not that interested in Andy Warhol or Arthur Miller, and their histories were used to pull together narrative threads for a long section of the book during which I was less engaged. But Harry Smith, about whom I'd previously known nothing, was fascinating.
The story of the hotel owners, restaurant workers, and staff of the hotel intrigued me. The glimpses the text gives us in between other characters of the hotel owners were really great and I would read a novel or watch a tv show from that perspective quite happily. Stanley Bard! I would watch the Stanley Bard hotel-manager-for-the-often-broke-frequently-unstable-artists reality tv show for sure.
I've been reading a ton of Captain America fanfic this year, and one thing that kept me entertained throughout the book was picturing the Winter Soldier showing up and crashing at the Chelsea during various periods covered in the text. I would be 100% up for reading a version of this book which was just a bewildered Bucky Barnes wandering into the Chelsea Hotel every decade or two when he escaped from his handlers: trying to figure out why the place was slowly falling apart, getting propositioned by Jack Kerouac, talking about Howard Stark's inventions with Arthur C. Clarke, wandering like a drugged out automaton through the back of Warhol films, getting recognized by the 100 year old residents who'd lived there for fifty years, and then, I dunno, breaking into the currently boarded up building for secret rendezvous with Captain America in the present, post the 2nd Captain America movie.
So, yeah: plenty of interesting fodder here if you already knew some of the people named, and were already curious about them, and it's a fun world to play in, but it didn't quite satisfy me on its own / in and of itself. But if you're looking for some playground furniture for your mental / historical New York playground, it's full of highly useful tidbits and leads.
I think how much someone likes this book will depend a lot on their general knowledge of New York cultural history and the interest they have in the specific people who get profiled most heavily in the text. There's quite a bit of stuff that's interesting in here about people like Stephen Crane, Brendan Behan, the Beat poets, and rock musicians of the 60s, and 70s. I'm not sure how effective the gossip would be for people who aren't familiar with the artists discussed, but if a reader sat down with youtube/google and pulled up musicians and artists as they were mentioned it might be a very fun experience.
Complaints, niggly thoughts, and personal reflections:
I'm always happy to read about boys kissing other boys, but... given how many men in the book were explicitly marked out as homosexual or bisexual by the text, I was very disappointed in how few women were marked out as lesbian or bisexual. Either the Chelsea Hotel was home to very few queer women or the text has a serious imbalance there. It could easily just be a case of... general erasure of queer women in available texts being higher than erasure of queer men, and the author not having a reason to dig into that and question it? But as a queer person it irked me.
There's an opening chapter that talks about NYC in the second half of the 1800s, the gilded age and some of the social movements and communal living experiments of the time and how those movements influenced the developers of the building. I really enjoyed that chapter. I was hoping for more of that throughout the text, and I didn't feel like it quite continued at that level.
The book seemed sympathetic to labor movements, unions, and other left-leaning organizations, but there were some weird narrative pronouncements about historical change that felt very odd to me, and I couldn't tell if they were narrative judgements by the text/author or reporting of the attitudes held by the people the author was talking about.
I'm not that interested in Andy Warhol or Arthur Miller, and their histories were used to pull together narrative threads for a long section of the book during which I was less engaged. But Harry Smith, about whom I'd previously known nothing, was fascinating.
The story of the hotel owners, restaurant workers, and staff of the hotel intrigued me. The glimpses the text gives us in between other characters of the hotel owners were really great and I would read a novel or watch a tv show from that perspective quite happily. Stanley Bard! I would watch the Stanley Bard hotel-manager-for-the-often-broke-frequently-unstable-artists reality tv show for sure.
I've been reading a ton of Captain America fanfic this year, and one thing that kept me entertained throughout the book was picturing the Winter Soldier showing up and crashing at the Chelsea during various periods covered in the text. I would be 100% up for reading a version of this book which was just a bewildered Bucky Barnes wandering into the Chelsea Hotel every decade or two when he escaped from his handlers: trying to figure out why the place was slowly falling apart, getting propositioned by Jack Kerouac, talking about Howard Stark's inventions with Arthur C. Clarke, wandering like a drugged out automaton through the back of Warhol films, getting recognized by the 100 year old residents who'd lived there for fifty years, and then, I dunno, breaking into the currently boarded up building for secret rendezvous with Captain America in the present, post the 2nd Captain America movie.
So, yeah: plenty of interesting fodder here if you already knew some of the people named, and were already curious about them, and it's a fun world to play in, but it didn't quite satisfy me on its own / in and of itself. But if you're looking for some playground furniture for your mental / historical New York playground, it's full of highly useful tidbits and leads.
