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

by Sherill Tippins

  The essential problem with modern society, Fourier believed, was its mind-boggling inefficiency. In order to serve the needs and desires of a minuscule privileged merchant class, the vast majority of citizens sacrificed their creative potential to lives of tedium and want as factory workers, servants, clerks, and manual laborers. The contrast between rich and poor had grown so stark—many among the majority were just one week’s pay away from homelessness and starvation—that men were willing to cheat, steal, and betray their brothers for a chance to enter the moneyed class, and women felt compelled to auction themselves off to the wealthiest suitors. To maintain their own positions, the wealthy armed themselves with brokers, speculators, and other middlemen who took their cut of the nation’s wealth while producing nothing themselves. Worst of all, the competition for privilege pitted citizens against one another, robbing them of the benefits and pleasures of community life. Isolated in their separate homes, family members came to loathe one another, and thousands of women wastefully duplicated the tasks of domestic work and childcare.

  Such a system corrupted everyone, Fourier wrote, as the wealthy wasted their lives in forced indolence, and the poor in unending drudgery. What was needed was a clearing of the decks of centuries of mindless custom, followed by a scientific approach toward answering these essential questions: What made for a fulfilling life? What did people really want, and what did they need? And how could a structure be created to fulfill the desires and needs of everyone, not just the fortunate few, in a way that would benefit all?

  For years, in the hours not wasted at his job as a city clerk, Fourier filled hundreds of pages with ideas about how to create such a social structure—ideas based not on the past or on current perceived needs but on eternal, universal laws of human nature. Expanding on Isaac Newton’s theories of gravitational force, Fourier came to believe that each of nature’s creatures, including humans, was attracted toward a particular set of activities and behaviors in the same way that a falling apple was drawn by gravity toward the earth. Over time, he developed a chart defining 810 personality types that represented every possible combination of “passionate attraction” in every variety of relative strengths. Because these diverse predilections were natural and God-given, Fourier wrote, it was society’s sacred duty to permit them to develop unimpeded—allowing the “butterflies” to flit from one interest to the next, for example; assigning titles and uniforms to those who craved deference and respect; and giving the gossips a forum for exchanging news. Each personality type could be compared, in fact, to a key on a keyboard that, when played in glorious harmony with all of its fellows, produced a symphony of human expression—a synergistic “music of humanity” spurring the population forward in its spiritual and social evolution.

  The trick lay in building a social instrument to house those keys so that each note could ring free and true. Fourier presented his idea for such a social structure: a self-contained community, which he called a phalanx, in homage to the close-knit military formations of ancient Greece. Each phalanx would consist of a full complement of 1,620 individuals—a male and a female representative of each of his 810 personality types—living together in an enormous palace, called a phalanstery, surrounded by workshops, orchards, and fields. As a group, the phalanx would make its living largely through agriculture and craftwork. But within the group, each individual could choose how much to contribute in terms of labor, special talent, or cash and lead a life of corresponding luxury or simplicity as a result. One could even forgo traditional labor in favor of study, artistic pursuits, or sheer leisure and still enjoy subsistence-level living, thanks to the collective savings realized through shared cooking, childcare, and resources. And all could take advantage of much grander libraries, dining halls, conservatories, and ballrooms than most isolated families could afford.

  Supported by such a structure, members of various economic classes would find it natural to mingle freely without envy, sharing intellectual interests and creative activities along with domestic duties. With each man and woman assigned to his or her own private quarters, whether married or not, all would enjoy the space and freedom to follow their natural passions to full fruition. Under such conditions, inventions would proliferate, Fourier wrote, and he would not be surprised if a full-fledged phalanx produced a Milton or Molière with every generation. To maximize its chances, each phalanx would construct its own opera house where members could reflect on their shared experiences in the forms of music, art, drama, and dance.

  Fourier’s emphasis on pleasure and creativity appealed to Colomb Gengembre and his liberal-minded comrades, as did his practical strategy to free up the logjams of social productivity—an approach that Fourier fortified with extensive supporting documents ranging from blueprints for a phalanstery to menus for collective feasts. Fresh from the battles of the July Revolution, the young Frenchmen also appreciated Fourier’s claim that violence was unnecessary to create this new society. All the men need do was develop their own model phalanx. When others saw how successful it was, they would leave their miserable lives to establish communities of their own, and, in time, Fourier’s glorious human symphonies would cover the planet in a universal system he called perfect harmony—the next stage in human evolution.

  By the time Hubert was two, his father and his colleagues had commenced building a model phalanstery outside of Paris, near the Gengembres’ country home. Philip’s earliest memories dated back to those days when his father, as the project’s architect, directed the construction of the community’s workshops and common rooms. But as the project continued, personal disputes escalated. Finally, Colomb threw up his hands and resigned, then retreated with his family to the castle of his father, Philippe Gengembre, director of the government ironworks at Indret, on the Loire River.

  For the next five years, young Philip soaked up the atmosphere of his grandfather’s workshop, adopting the old man’s passion for inventions, paging through his library full of books on English architecture, and absorbing his determination to improve conditions in his workers’ lives. When Philippe died, in 1838, his nine-year-old namesake left Indret with his parents, but as soon as Philip was old enough, he returned to take a job, unrecognized, in the factory his grandfather had designed.

  These were hard years for Philip, who hoarded as much of his pay as possible to buy the books he needed for study. In time, he moved up to a job as a government clerk, but then came the bloody 1848 Paris uprising, which reduced the Fourierist movement to ashes and led to the exile of its leaders, several of whom went to the United States, where they hoped they might have a second chance to realize their utopian dream.

  A strong Fourierist movement already existed there, initiated by Albert Brisbane, a well-to-do New Yorker who had caught the fever of utopianism during a visit to Paris and who had begun promoting Fourier’s ideas back home in his friend Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. In a nation then undergoing a severe recession, the French dream of economic and individual freedom took root. “The rich were enticed, the poor encouraged; the laboring classes were aroused,” one veteran of the movement recalled, by Brisbane’s assurance that a small experimental phalanx could be created for less than the cost of a small railroad or bank. Phalansteries soon sprang up in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, while some already established communities, such as Vermont’s Putney Association (later renamed the Oneida colony) and the Massachusetts Brook Farm community, integrated aspects of Fourierist theory into their routines.

  Brook Farm, founded by a group of New England transcendentalists that included Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau, had begun its experiment in rural communal living with what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor.” But farming proved tougher than anticipated by this group of intellectuals, and by the mid-1840s, the community was going broke. Fourier’s method, in which the task of managing the collective was assigned to the “skilled mechanic class,” who enjoyed it most, seemed
to some a pragmatic way to improve productivity while maintaining the idealistic life they treasured. As invitations went out to farmers, artisans, and other practical types to join them, the group began publishing a Fourierist journal called the Harbinger and started construction of a simplified phalanstery.

  In 1849, these and other promising signs convinced Philip’s father to take his family to America. Philip chose to come along so he could train with his father as an architect and embark on a “life of practical action” like that of his beloved grandfather. Philip was nineteen—the same age as the doomed girl Paula—when the family arrived in New York City. By that point, the Erie Canal had allowed New York to surpass Boston in trade volume and Philadelphia in size, and the city, preening in its new status as America’s leading metropolis, was busily carving elegant new districts out of the swamps and squatters’ villages of Gramercy Park and Union Square. Wandering past block after block of identical brownstones spreading “like cold chocolate sauce” to house an exploding middle class, both father and son were convinced that the American energy and enterprise on display here were all that was needed finally to achieve real social revolution.

  But even as the French family continued on to their new home in Cincinnati, it was clear that the American Fourierist movement had begun to collapse. At Brook Farm, clashes had developed between the spiritually oriented original members and the more practical-minded new arrivals. At the same time, rumors had begun to spread of aspects of Fourier’s utopian plan that his American proponent Brisbane had neglected to reveal. These had to do with the philosopher’s plans for the sexual lives of phalanx members, which Fourier believed should be as unfettered as their creative and intellectual pursuits. Not only did he insist that each individual be allowed to follow his or her God-given attraction to homosexual, bisexual, sadomasochistic, or any other form of intercourse, but he recommended “celebratory orgies” as a way to strengthen communal bonds, and he advocated a guaranteed minimum level of sexual satisfaction for each phalanx member, provided by either a loving partner or a saintly volunteer.

  These suggestions were so shocking to nineteenth-century readers’ sense of propriety that even Fourier’s disciples in France tried to suppress them. But Fourier’s ideas regarding sexuality were not the worst of what was revealed. Newly released writings in which Fourier extended his theory of universal attraction from the natural world out to the planets and stars struck readers as literally insane. According to his cosmic scheme, discordance at one end of the universal scale reverberated like a sour note all the way to the other end. Thus, the frustration of natural desire caused by the strictures of modern civilization spread negative energy daily throughout the universe, throwing the planets out of sync and “poisoning” the moon. The liberating pleasures of phalanx life could reverse this process, however, and return the cosmos to its natural harmonic state. As phalanxes multiplied and human society evolved, the planet would achieve a state of such universal concord and joy that people would abandon their bodies en masse and rise up as spirits to the heavens.

  Perhaps it was true, as some suggested, that Fourier created these bizarre fantasies to bait his critics, or perhaps he thought they would entice and inspire his readers. Whatever the motive, this French concoction of the sublime and the ridiculous proved too rich for the American palate. One by one, the already financially strained phalanxes shriveled in the heat of national harassment and ridicule. At Brook Farm, the still-unfinished phalanstery burned down. Soon afterward, the community itself closed its doors, and the cadre of young men who had produced the Harbinger drifted to New York to take jobs with the city’s mainstream press.

  With the movement collapsed, architectural commissions for phalansteries were scarce in Ohio, and it became clear that Philip had to find some other way to survive. Thanks to his British mother, he spoke English fluently, and he adopted her family surname of Hubert—easier for Americans to pronounce than Gengembre. Soon, after marrying the daughter of another Anglo-French family in Cincinnati, Philip drifted into work as a French-language instructor and eventually founded his own school in Boston.

  In those years preceding the Civil War, Boston was alive with stimulating activity and progressive ideas. Hubert’s genteel upbringing, natural charm, and ability to converse “with keen intelligence and originality upon politics, social science, invention and literature” easily won him a place in that city’s intellectual circles. Like many of this group, Hubert was abstemious in his personal habits, maintaining a vegetarian diet and spending his free time sketching, writing and staging amateur theatricals, and tinkering with inventions. In time, he was offered an assistant professorship at Harvard, and he might have accepted had not a peculiar event interceded: the sale of the patent for one of his inventions—a “self-fastening button”—to the U.S. government for use on Union army uniforms. The payment of a staggering $120,000 made Hubert a wealthy man. Now he could create a future of his own devising—the life of practical action that he had planned for himself at age nineteen. He would return to New York, the dynamic city in the making that he had loved at first sight more than a decade before, start a new life as an architect, and literally help build the new, postwar society.

  Training would be needed. Hubert settled his wife and children in a townhouse on East Seventy-Ninth Street, in what were then the city’s semirural northern reaches alongside Central Park, and planned to make several extended trips to Europe to study architecture. But the city he encountered when he arrived with his family in 1865 had changed considerably from the one he’d first visited. The commercial wealth that was transforming Union Square in 1849 had been a mere preamble to the tidal wave of profits that rolled through the city during the Civil War—new wealth that turned grocers and cloth merchants into millionaires who demanded respect and a place in New York society. Clogging the streets with their fancy carriages and crowding the avenues with their brownstone mansions, they drove up prices for the rich as well as the poor. Financially outstripped, members of society’s Old Guard felt compelled to defend their positions, barring newcomers from buying season boxes in their beloved Academy of Music and producing an Elite Directory that listed only the New Yorkers of whom its dowagers approved.

  Twenty-Third Street became the front line in this battle between old money and new. Not so long ago, this district around Madison Square had been known for its farmlands and charming roadside inns; it was the site of the bucolic Chelsea Estate, whose scholarly owner, Clement Clarke Moore, had composed “A Visit from St. Nicholas” for his children on a sleigh ride home from the city one Christmas Eve. Now, as the city’s old-line aristocracy advanced north up Fifth Avenue toward Twenty-Third Street, a motley assortment of stock speculators, railroad magnates, politicians, and other members of the new order began assembling at the white-marble Fifth Avenue Hotel just to the north of Madison Square. In 1869, society ladies’ carriages lined Twenty-Third Street’s south side, while on its north side at Eighth Avenue rose the Grand Opera House, a glittering bauble of the infamous stock speculator Jay Gould and his partner, a former circus roustabout known as Gentleman Jim Fisk.

  “I worship in the synagogue of the libertines. You’d do the same if you only had the chance,” Fisk boasted, and many of this new breed of New Yorker could only agree. In wresting control of the Erie Railway away from old steamship magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt—one step in a plan to create a transportation monopoly from the Midwest to the East Coast—Gould and Fisk had done their part to usher in the new era of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism that was making kings of their young contemporaries Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan, among others. To win the necessary railroad shares, Gould and Fisk had had to grease the palms of countless New York state legislators and judges, and it was through this process that they learned what a powerful ally government could be.

  It was William “Boss” Tweed, the burly, red-haired leader of Tammany Hall and son of New York City’s notorious Seventh Ward, who delivered the b
ags of gold to the necessary protectors of the public interest on Gould and Fisk’s behalf. A quick study, a man with shrewd intelligence and a dominating nature, Tweed had worked out a system to harvest princely fortunes in kickbacks, and he’d used the system to good effect in such civic construction projects as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, and the phenomenally opulent New York County Courthouse near City Hall. As his take from every carpenter, plasterer, ironworker, and antiques dealer increased from fifteen to thirty-five to sixty and even ninety cents of every city dollar spent, he was forced to partner up with an old friend from the neighborhood just to manage the increasingly complex system of kickbacks, payouts, and bribes. As it turned out, the new partner, Jimmy Ingersoll—a stoop-shouldered, bespectacled German-American chair-maker from the Bowery—was a genius at the job. A New York Times reporter would later marvel that under Ingersoll’s direction, “what had previously been but a bungling, imperfect system was soon reduced to a science.”

  Big Tweed and little Ingersoll, big Fisk and little Gould: the two pairs of partners—one in government, the other in finance—together robbed the city blind. What did it matter if one pair feasted on New Yorkers’ tax dollars and the other profited by bankrupting innocent investors? Everyone loved a winner. And the city won too; it got world-class monuments, donations to charitable causes, and titillating stories of Fisk’s fun-loving mistress, the corpulent Josie Mansfield, dancing the cancan on the Grand Opera House stage.

  Each time Hubert returned to New York from one of his trips abroad, the level of corruption in the city, and the consequent suffering of the downtown poor, seemed to have increased geometrically. In 1869, the Frenchman formed a partnership with architect James Pirsson, a piano maker’s son who shared Hubert’s love of the arts, and the two began designing their first private homes near Union Square. At the same time, the Ingersoll-Tweed partnership purchased a controlling interest in the prestigious design firm Pottier and Stymus—suppliers of fresco panels and silk-upholstered armchairs to rising members of the American plutocracy, including the state legislators Tweed continued to bribe. Ingersoll established himself as a respectable tradesman; he was no longer a humble chair-maker but a prestigious cabinetmaker, no longer Jimmy but James. He then secured his position in society by marrying Ida Ogilvie, twenty-three-year-old daughter of one of New York’s most venerable families, in a ceremony celebrated by the press as the “marriage of a seventh son of Mars.”