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

by Sherill Tippins

  Howells had begun the novel out of a nostalgic desire to relive that happy period that he saw, in retrospect, as a crucial turning point in the city’s artistic growth. It had done his heart good in recent months to recall the bright-faced students at the Chelsea—those “green shoots of young life” from small American towns—filling the apartments and public rooms with “a vague, high faith and hope.” He had delighted in creating the character Charmian Maybough, a well-to-do young artist who confided breathlessly to a new friend, “I’m going to show you where I live, where I dream,” and then led her up “eight or ten steps that crooked upward” to a large, high-ceilinged, tapestry-lined studio with enormous windows open to the sunlight and a great tiger-skin rug before the fireplace. Drawing on his impressions of Dewey and Murphy and their artist wives, he was able to flesh out the character of his protagonist, Ludlow, a brooding American painter who “hoped to be saved by tone contrasts,” and the provincial student with whom he falls in love. Thanks to numerous guided tours by his daughter Mildred and her friends, Howells was even able to accurately re-create that “quaint old rookery,” the old Art Students’ League on Twenty-Third Street, with its wandering corridors, rundown ateliers, and the quote from Emerson chalked on an overhead beam: “Congratulate yourselves if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.”

  Yet something was missing from his portrayal of 1880s New York. For once in his life, Howells was finding a novel difficult to complete. The plot was “behaving ungratefully,” he wrote to his father. It was natural, then, to leave his manuscript untouched on his desk and instead pick up a small, saffron-yellow paperback beside it titled Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York), by an author named Johnston Smith. The writer Hamlin Garland, a longtime friend and admirer of Howells, had recommended the book as an interesting new take on New York. Garland, who frequently lectured on Howells’s theory of literary realism, had met its author two years earlier, following a talk in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The writer, a skinny, shock-haired, nineteen-year-old reporter whose real name was Stephen Crane, had been assigned to cover Garland’s lecture. But for this avid reader, a minister’s son and the youngest of fourteen children, the experience was a revelation.

  Crane had listened with increasing excitement to Garland’s argument that great literature did not require spiritual transcendence over the dross of everyday life; on the contrary, it called for the novelist to scrupulously observe and interpret reality as he saw it so that both he and his readers might come to a useful understanding of one another’s experience. Crane had independently formulated a “little creed of art which I thought was a good one,” as he later wrote to a friend, and was thrilled now to discover “that my creed was identical with the one of Howells and Garland.” Still, it was most likely his reading of Zola that sparked Crane’s ambition to tell the story of a New York slum girl’s life: Maggie, whose trusting innocence would lead to her seduction, abandonment, and death. Crane knew that other writers had presented stories of tenement girls in numerous salacious morality tales and melodramas, but those authors had looked at their subjects from the patronizing viewpoint of their own middle class. Crane would convey Maggie’s hard truths not through his own or anyone else’s eyes but from the point of view of the girl herself.

  Unlike Howells, whose delicate nature had prevented him from ever even entering one of the horrible New York tenements where families lived eight to a room without running water, light, or fresh air, Crane received a typical city reporter’s introduction to some of New York’s darkest corners. He quickly got to know the fetid alleys of Ragpickers’ Row and the notorious mixed-race “black-and-tan” saloons of Thompson and Wooster Streets. In autumn 1892, as Howells struggled with The Coast of Bohemia in his apartment overlooking Central Park, Crane moved into a cold-water apartment on Manhattan’s far East Side with a view of the Blackwell’s Island insane asylum and prison.

  In the harsh winter months preceding Howells’s visit to the Columbian Exposition, Crane had wandered the Bowery in rags, seeking experiences to enhance his novel in progress. While Howells wrote of “artistic” Charmian in her penthouse studio with its daring tiger skin, Crane and a colleague, huddled for warmth beneath their own tiger skin borrowed from an artist friend, were arrested for vagrancy on the frozen streets of the Tenderloin. And while Howells kept to his fastidious schedule of four hours’ writing each morning, Crane scribbled through the night in his cold upstairs room, puffing on his pipe despite a hacking cough, oblivious to his gnawing hunger. What Crane described—the “dust-stained walls, and the scant and crude furniture” of Maggie’s mother’s apartment—was real. The model for the mother herself—“the drunk, so familiar to the officials at the local courthouse that they called her by her first name, ‘Hello, Mary, you here again?’”—could be found begging that winter on the streets downtown.

  Despite Garland’s urging, however, no magazine editor in New York would consider serializing a novel with such profane language and vulgar subject matter. In frustration, Crane finally used a small inheritance to self-publish the book as a fifty-cent paperback, taking a pseudonym on the advice of a fellow writer. Once the book was published, his loyal roommates tried to spark interest in it by reading it conspicuously on the elevated train, throwing a party at which guests were threatened with a hammer if they didn’t buy copies, and inundating critics with copies for review. But readers, appalled by Crane’s descriptions of tenement mothers shaking their children by the necks until they rattled, responded with silence. “No one would see it,” Crane wrote in disbelief, “not even the jays who would sell their souls for a nickel.” Casting about for some solution, Garland suggested that Crane send a copy to William Dean Howells.

  It was a wise decision. That spring evening in 1893, Howells sat down to read Maggie, and he fell in love with Crane’s writing from the first page. No novel in America could have provided a darker contrast to the idealism he had just observed in Chicago’s White City or to the tentative blossoming celebrated in his own Coast of Bohemia. Yet Howells realized instantly that here was true literature that rattled readers’ bones and thus might actually force Americans forward in their moral and cultural growth. In the presence of such democratic literature, Howells himself felt “something like an anachronism, something like a fraud.”

  Howells invited Crane to tea, and was amused to find that the emaciated young author stammered as awkwardly through the introductions as Howells himself had at that age. Their conversation moved quickly from petty pleasantries toward their real passions—Zola and de Maupassant, the socialist journals Arena and Forum, and the plight of the city’s poor. Hours passed before both realized that Crane’s stay had extended far beyond the customary period for tea.

  In the months that followed, Howells joined Garland in promoting Crane, recommending Maggie to Twain and other influential friends, including editors who might assign the penniless writer some work. Their ongoing conversation continued as well. Howells nominated Crane for membership in the New York Authors’ Club, while Crane invited Howells to rowdy dinners at the Lantern Club, housed in a rooftop shanty near the Brooklyn Bridge where rebel writers held “high intellectual revels,” challenging one another’s literary theories and reading their stories aloud.

  That winter of 1893, another economic panic descended on the city, and Crane joined a breadline in one of the decade’s worst blizzards to experience the homeless men’s ordeal, “stooping like a race of aged people,” the wind lashing their faces “as from a thousand needle-prickings” as they huddled in close bunches to stay warm. Howells responded with his own depiction of a breadline—and even if his portrayal was presented, typically, from the viewpoint of a middle-class gentleman passing in a carriage, “wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat,” it was clear that he felt inspired. To the amusement of his protégés, he began advising literary newcomers to be like Crane if they wanted to create great literature—to immerse themsel
ves in the streets of the city and “live!”

  Over the next year, with Howells’s enthusiastic backing, Crane published his greatest work, The Red Badge of Courage, the book that would make him a literary star. Relocating to an unheated top-floor loft at 165 West Twenty-Third Street with a commanding view of the Chelsea Association Building half a block west—the Chelsea itself still not quite suitable for a man of his habits—Crane looked forward to a life of assignations and all-night poker games with his bohemian friends. But city officials, tired of being lampooned by Crane for their incompetence and corruption, set a trap for the writer that resulted in his being forced to take the stand in court and testify to his opium use, degenerate associations, and other scandalous behavior. Howells had to watch, horrified, as, within the space of a year, Crane fell from publicly acclaimed author to object of disdain. His heart quailed as the younger writer left New York to cover the looming war in Cuba, insisting cavalierly that “it must be interesting to be shot.”

  Crane had been so efficiently dispatched the moment he presented a threat that Howells began to wonder whether literature of any sort could have a positive effect on society’s development. As for Bellamy’s Looking Backward, it seemed that now, about ten years after its appearance had held out the promise of consolidated corporate power benefiting all, the benefits were going not to ordinary Americans but to a privileged few. A strange new race of men using finance like a weapon had arisen in America. One glimpsed them—Rockefeller and Carnegie and Morgan and their ilk—traveling in “their private railway-cars . . . with curtains drawn, wined and dined by governors and presidents.” The expansion of their enterprises would soon make the United States the wealthiest and most productive country in the world. Yet the men in the private cars wanted more. And they got what they wanted—Cuba.

  Cuba’s “liberation,” followed by conquests in the Philippines and Latin America, opened the way for American business to develop new markets and extend conglomerates internationally. Once the dam of foreign conquest was breached, nothing could stop its progress—certainly not Howells’s protestations of the wars as “wicked, wanton” imperialist pursuits, or his help in organizing an Anti-Imperialist League, or even his enlistment of Mark Twain, who, with customary irritation, informed the press, “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

  Any effects on society made by realistic novels were hard to gauge when the entire nation, drunk with the prospect of becoming a world power, turned toward popular novels featuring “court-intrigues in imaginary countries in the Balkans,” or “big bold Americans” who “in one way or another humbled effete Europeans as America [had] humbled Spain.” If thousands of American soldiers and more than half a million Filipinos died in the struggle to establish a base seven hundred miles from the vast consumer market of China, for the men in the private railway cars—and, apparently, for most ordinary Americans—the “hideousness of carnage and the fearful blow to civic progress,” as the Nation called it, were worth the price that others paid.

  THE CRASHING WAVES of these economic and political events at the turn of the century proved too destructive for the still-delicate society whose formation Howells had described in Coast of Bohemia. As one century ended and another began, an extraordinary number of Chelsea Association members were washed overboard, succumbing to bankruptcy, scandal, legal battles, and other disasters. The economic panic of 1893 brought an end to the private donations supporting the National Conservatory of Music, leading to Dvořák’s departure and the termination of Laura Sedgwick Collins’s lessons in composition. Shortly after the death of the railway investor Colonel Origen Vandenburgh, his newly impoverished widow was arrested for theft. Dr. William Buddington, a retired physician, was bludgeoned in the street by a policeman for no apparent reason. Chelsea Association board member Andrew J. Campbell was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1894 only to die weeks later of a cold caught riding in an open carriage. As for the artists, while Childe Hassam had long ago moved uptown, the Deweys, the Rehns, and the Murphys survived, even though it meant trading their artwork for necessities, and remained to live and paint at the Chelsea for decades to come.

  Stephen Crane himself died in the first year of the new century, of the tuberculosis that had plagued him for most of his life. But for Howells, Crane’s Maggie would remain, eternally drifting westward along West Twenty-Third Street, that lighted avenue “filled with people desperately bound on missions,” where “an endless crowd darted at the elevated station stairs, and the horse-cars were thronged with owners of bundles,” where “electric lights, whirring softly, shed a blurred radiance” as “two or three theatres emptied a crowd.” Ignored and invisible in the “atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity that seemed to hang over the throng,” she kept walking “into darker blocks than those where the crowd traveled,” until, “at the feet of the tall buildings appeared the deathly black hue of the river. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against the timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence.”

  In the coming century, there would be no room at the Chelsea for the “small coin . . . the dandies and ennuyées . . . with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, pianosongs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation” of European style whom Howells had fictionalized so expertly in his bohemian novel. Howells, now well into his sixties, understood that the time had passed for his literature of objective realism. As in the 1860s, when he had first perceived a need for change in the nature of American literature, the nation’s social balance had readjusted. More momentous events demanded a more powerful response. If America were ever to become a true democracy, the stories of all of its people had to be heard.

  Paula, the mysterious fable coiner, did have friends at the Chelsea. If the urban phalanstery was ever to achieve its destiny, it was time for Paula and those like her to come inside.

  3

  Four Saints in Three Acts

  This picture . . . has beauty, I’ll not deny it; it must be that human life is beautiful.

  —JOHN SLOAN, John Sloan’s New York Scene

  THERE WAS NO MISTAKING the disheveled giant of a man leaning on the front desk in the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea that late-October afternoon in 1937. The wrinkled suit, the shock of uncombed hair, the low Southern drawl were familiar to Edgar Lee Masters from his encounter with Thomas Wolfe at a party two years before. It was a surprise, though, to spot the literary wunderkind in this quiet, somewhat shabby hotel. Authors as famous as Wolfe usually preferred to stay at the Algonquin, where they could be feted by editors and interviewers. One came to the Chelsea to work.

  Wolfe’s star did seem to have dimmed a bit of late, however. Rumors had circulated following the publication of his Look Homeward, Angel that Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, had created that first novel out of a mass of untamed pages that no other publisher would accept. The rumors had multiplied with Wolfe’s second novel, Of Time and the River, the eighteen-hundred-page final draft that Perkins was said to have cut in half with hardly a consultation with Wolfe. Angel appeared in 1929, River in 1935, and in the two years since, Wolfe had produced a rash of essays and short stories but no third novel. Now, people said, Scribner’s was waiting for the author’s next big book, and the longer the wait, the more tongues wagged: People said that the times had moved past Thomas Wolfe, that he was a has-been at age forty-one. As Masters knew, the next phase in a writer’s descent was even worse—when people stopped talking about you at all.

  At age sixty-nine, two decades past the apex of his own career, Masters was still plagued at every turn by “damn pigeon-holers” who lavished praise on that goddamned Spoon River—his collection of free-verse epitaphs that had spewed forth when he was a lawyer and family man bored to death in Chicago—and ignored the dozens of poetry collections, novels, biographies, and plays
he’d completed since then in blissful freedom in New York. It had not escaped his notice that with each book, the check from his publisher grew smaller and his editor became more difficult to reach. If his neighbors at the Chelsea wondered what made him respond to their holiday greetings with an irritated “For Christ’s sake!,” Spoon River and its aftermath were the reasons why.

  In any case, Masters respected any young writer who’d been raised like Masters himself, with his feet in the provincial mud, and dared to take the hide off his hometown as Wolfe had with Angel. Through his protagonist and alter ego Eugene Gant, Wolfe had exposed North Carolina’s bigots and fornicators as no Southern writer had done before. It was with the greatest sincerity, then—and just a hint of morbid curiosity—that Masters propelled himself over to the hulking young novelist to ask whether he could offer some assistance. Wolfe flinched at first, giving him the hunted look of a man accustomed to fending off admirers. But when he recognized the author of Spoon River—“one of the great books of the nation’s literature,” in his opinion—his face cleared and he shook Masters’s hand. With his characteristic slight stammer, Wolfe explained that he needed a private, inexpensive place to write in New York, and he’d remembered that his editor had once recommended this hotel. What did Masters think—could a man concentrate here?

  Of course! Masters proclaimed in his booming courthouse voice that there was no better home for a writer than the Hotel Chelsea. He urged Wolfe to sign the register and stood by as the younger man grasped the pen, observing with satisfaction Wolfe’s receding hairline and slightly drooping jowls. Wunderkind or not, the author of Look Homeward, Angel needed spectacles to read. But Masters meant what he’d said about the Chelsea. Granted, it lacked the polish of the Algonquin, with its fabled Round Table wits and bow-tied maître d’. The Chelsea had had a run of bad luck—bankrupted by the one-two punch of the 1893 and 1903 recessions, abandoned by New York’s northward-migrating upper crust—and in 1905, its board of directors had had no choice but to convert it from an apartment house to a residential hotel.