Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel
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Still, for people with small bank accounts but big imaginations, a unique and intriguing spirit lingered in the atmosphere. Like a stately ocean liner, the enormous Victorian-era residence had withstood the battering of the district’s successive waves of vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons, oyster houses and seamen’s bars, office buildings and warehouse lofts. Inside the Chelsea, a tradition of tolerance, built into its bones, had allowed its occupants to weather these changes with equanimity. Where else in New York could one expect Laura Sedgwick Collins, now a highly respected cultural grande dame in her midforties, to fall into an animated discussion of theater acoustics with visiting vaudeville star Eva Tanguay, the “I Don’t Care” girl who danced in a dress made of mirrors singing “My voice may be funny / But it’s making me the money” and who was rumored to be having an affair with the African-American vaudeville comedian George Walker? Where else could plainly dressed women’s advocate and Progressive Jane Croly (better known by her pen name, Jenny June) form an alliance with the diamond-bedecked Mrs. Frank Leslie of the Frank Leslie publishing fortune that would result in Leslie’s willing her millions to the suffragist movement for the final push to get the women’s vote? The Chelsea’s reputation for social diversity in elegant surroundings had continued to attract a stimulating array of visitors, from Lillian Russell to Isadora Duncan. I t had so charmed William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name O. Henry), the popular chronicler of the lives of shop girls and laborers in turn-of-the-century New York, that he made a quiet rear-facing room his preferred hideaway from creditors and editors, and eventually moved in after his late-in-life marriage to a Southern bride.
Of course, with transient guests came unpredictability. Even with rates set rather high for each of its 125 units—the Chelsea Association charged a dollar fifty per day for a former maid’s chamber with shared bath down the hall; two dollars for a room with bath; and from four to five dollars for a one- or two-bedroom suite—unpleasantness intruded, as in any hotel. Occasionally, the association’s manager had to dispose of the body of a deceased guest—the quiet, well-to-do Miss Almyra Wilcox, found dead from an overdose with a half-written love letter beside her on the bed, for example, or the young artist Frank Kavecky, who, when robbed of funds he was holding for the Hungarian Sick and Benevolent Society, had checked into a room at the Chelsea and shot himself in the head. In 1912, when survivors of the Titanic disaster straggled into the city via the West Side piers, a number were welcomed into the Chelsea to convalesce. But death and illness were a part of life, and life went on with its gossip and debates, friendships and resentments, as old residents and new clients and staff faced the vicissitudes of New York life as a generally cohesive unit. As General Stillman Foster Kneeland, aging collector of Gainsboroughs and Whistlers, wrote in his poem “Roofland,” a 1914 tribute to the many evenings passed with his neighbors in the Chelsea’s flowering roof gardens:
The night grows gray as we linger
And music fills the street;
But we heed not the song, or the singer,
Or the rhythmical patter of feet:
For our souls are in tune
With the gay old moon
And our little world is complete.
In the early 1920s, however, with little more than half of the original Association members and tenants remaining at the Chelsea—entitled by their yellowed leases to inhabit palatial apartments at nineteenth-century rents—the burden of overseeing an expanding transient population grew too great, and a professional management company was invited to lease and operate the building’s hotel business. The Knott Corporation, a family-run company with roots in England and generations of experience managing the Earle, the Judson, the Albert, and other small Greenwich Village hostels frequented by impecunious artists and writers, could be counted on to comprehend and maintain the cooperative’s values and intentions. In fact, the Knotts appeared unfazed by the aging interior’s need for repairs, by the increasing intrusion of soot and noise in the rooms from a widened West Twenty-Third Street filled with automobiles, or even by such surprises as the runaway pet-shop monkey that climbed up a Chelsea drainpipe and rampaged through the apartments shortly after the Knotts’ arrival, stealing food from kitchen tables and killing caged birds before a policeman punched it unconscious and carried it away. They immediately set to work modernizing this mammoth “Waldorf-Astoria” of their Greenwich Village–based empire, installing a reception desk at the base of the iron stairwell, subdividing more apartments, and renumbering the rooms so that the level above the lobby, what Americans would consider the second floor, became the first floor in European fashion. To compensate for the closing of the private dining rooms downstairs, they crammed jury-rigged kitchenettes into closets or entryways. When the fifteen-story Carteret Hotel rose on the Chelsea’s left flank near the end of the 1920s, plunging the Chelsea’s east wing into permanent gloom, the Knotts lowered room rates to attract the more impecunious artists and creative types who might be willing to accept such conditions.
By the time of Masters’s arrival early in the Depression, the hotel was—not surprisingly—struggling financially again. The number of transient rooms had increased to more than three hundred, flowered wallpaper had replaced the old American landscape paintings in the lobby, and the original furniture had been pushed back to make room for a serviceable circular red banquette that had an incongruous pineapple-shaped heater at its center to keep loiterers warm. Still, Masters had been charmed from the beginning by the atmosphere of the place: the desk clerks and switchboard operators who greeted residents with affectionate nicknames; the slyly humorous African-American bellmen and maids who had replaced the Victorian-era immigrant serving girls; the doormen who looked the other way when tenants’ children roller-skated through the lobby or, Masters gleefully boasted, when he missed the lobby spittoon. Only at the Chelsea would a hotel restaurant manager invite the artist John McKiernan to decorate the dining room with a series of murals and then, when they turned out to be satirical renditions of the politicians Huey Long, Alfred E. Smith, and James A. Farley, defy in the name of resisting censorship the management’s orders to destroy them. For a writer of Edgar Lee Masters’s sensibilities—surprisingly romantic beneath his prickly outer shell—there was something almost magical about the feeling of community at the Hotel Chelsea. Throughout his childhood in an Illinois prairie town whose atmosphere was “calculated to poison, pervert, and even to kill a sensitive nature,” and his young adulthood in Chicago mired in a pragmatic career in law, Masters had struggled to feed his creative imagination and develop his identity as a poet. Buying a fine house, fathering two children, even forming a partnership with famed labor lawyer Clarence Darrow did nothing to ease his sense of drifting friendless through life, “as solitary as the rhinoceros roaming the veldt.” If not for a cathartic affair with a bohemian Chicago beauty named Tennessee Mitchell, he might never have experienced the human connection needed to tap into the subconscious pool that produced Spoon River, his dystopian inversion of the sunny American narratives by William Dean Howells that he had devoured as a boy.
Now, here at the Chelsea in his quiet, rear-facing two-room suite, one of the original small apartments on the second floor, Masters had everything he needed: a rocking chair to read in, a fireplace for winter evenings, a radio for listening to prizefights, a switchboard operator to block calls, and a large desk tucked into the bay window with a view of brownstone gardens and weedy ailanthus trees. He liked living out of steamer trunks and cooking on hot plates. He appreciated the opportunity, while writing a book about Mark Twain, to go downstairs and stand in the very dining room where that writer had once held forth and to talk about those days with old-timers like Charles Melville Dewey, sole survivor of the circle of tonalist artists who had fought their way up from obscurity to take control of the American Academy of Design.
In this group of “posh bohemian people in a semi-posh hotel”—a self-enclosed village incongruously lodged in the
very heart of the fast-paced city—Masters lived as a poet for the first time in his life. He had learned the hard way that in order to create art, one must first create the life from which art can spring. These years at the Chelsea were “the most peaceful of my life, and the most productive,” he wrote in his memoir. And if his young second wife, Ellen, objected to the worn furnishings, the wisecracking elevator operator, and the periodic bedbug infestations as being beneath the dignity of her poet husband, so be it. He would live without her contagious laugh, her flashing green eyes, the click of her high heels on the bedroom floor. Masters had had his fill of dignity.
AS MASTERS HAD assured him he would, Wolfe found the Chelsea well suited to his purposes. The towering writer—Sinclair Lewis had remarked on first meeting him, “God-a-Mighty, you’re a big son-of-a-bitch, Tom!”—found room to spare in the corner suite into which he finally settled at the west end of the eighth floor. The two rooms, a mere one-fifth of one of the association’s original grand apartments, looked “as big as a skating rink” to a writer accustomed to Brooklyn basements and tight quarters on Manhattan’s East Side. Its stained-glass transoms and fireplaces with ornately carved surrounds appealed to Wolfe’s romantic nature. He particularly appreciated the spacious bathroom with its toilet set on a raised platform liked a throne. The quoted price of $34.67 per week—twice what Masters was paying six floors below—seemed reasonable to Wolfe, considering the views of northern Manhattan and the sunsets over the Hudson River.
Here was the perfect place for a man like Wolfe to start over, and he needed to: the rumors of his estrangement from his editor Max Perkins were true. In the years following their first collaboration, the two men had become as close as father and son, but the growing public consensus that Perkins was responsible for the author’s success had increasingly irritated Wolfe—particularly after the editor’s cavalier treatment of his novel Of Time and the River. The final blow to the relationship had been Perkins’s failure to offer Wolfe a new contract based on any of his proposals in the years that followed. The author had expected to publish “October Fair,” his name for Of Time and the River’s discarded second half, as his third novel, but Perkins shied away from the lightly fictionalized account of Wolfe’s lengthy affair with a well-known married New York woman. Casting about for another idea, Wolfe suggested creating a nineteenth-century prequel to Look Homeward, Angel, but the editor responded apathetically to that as well. Striving for something entirely new, Wolfe next came up with “The Hound of Darkness,” an experimental novel following the lives of a number of unrelated Americans on a single night—an attempt, he claimed, to capture and communicate the fascinating diversity of his native country. He completed about half of this manuscript before Perkins’s obvious lack of interest convinced him to give it up. For a while, the two men thought they had found a solution with “The Vision of Spangler’s Paul,” a Candide-like story of a decent American novelist ambushed by fame who ends up disappearing, or perhaps dying. But Wolfe ran out of steam again when Perkins, realizing that Scribner’s would serve as the model for the protagonist’s publisher, insisted he would have to resign if the novel was ever published.
By this time, Wolfe’s reservoir of self-doubt and resentment had simmered into a toxic brew. Feeling that his “great creative energy” was being “bottled up, not used,” he fled to Germany to soak up some adulation from the European nation that had always appreciated his novels most. Returning to the United States, he worked up the courage to hint at a break with his editor, announcing in a letter to Perkins that “I am going to write as I please. I have at last discovered my own America . . . I think I know my way.”
In October of 1937, though, he had yet to prove it. Other publishing houses had made overtures as news had spread of his break with Scribner’s. Robert Linscott, the highly regarded editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, hinted at the possibility of a ten-thousand-dollar advance if Wolfe would show him a portion of his next novel. The trouble was, Wolfe had nothing to show. The crate full of manuscripts that he had transferred to his Chelsea rooms contained thousands of pages cut from previous novels and short stories mixed together with the proposals that Perkins had rejected and other false starts. Wolfe’s challenge at the Chelsea would be to piece together from this chaos something Linscott might accept.
With the combined fear and exhilaration of a man restarting his life in the wake of a divorce, Wolfe unpacked his suitcases, set his crates on the living-room floor, and began pawing through the pages looking for something to sell. “October Fair” remained the work nearest completion. More than just the story of an affair, it told of a young man’s experience of New York during the 1920s boom years, and thus it might have something of consequence to say, he felt, about the causes—not just political but, more important, spiritual—of the ensuing economic downturn and its tragic consequences. Something had gone wrong; somewhere along the line, Americans had lost their connection with the land and with one another. Only by acknowledging and analyzing the “horror of our self-betrayal,” he felt, could they reclaim the promise of American life.
But the manuscript, written in fits and starts over four years, needed revision. Its sequences had to be arranged in logical order; transitions had to be created, additional scenes added, and the themes thought through. Placing a legal pad and a pencil beside the ragged stack of pages on the large, round table in the center of the living room, Wolfe set to work.
HAD MASTERS KNOWN the object of Wolfe’s explorations, he could easily have provided the answers that the younger writer sought. His own meditation in progress on the life of Twain pinned America’s moral downfall to its occupation of Cuba, that being the first of a series of imperialist adventures in which the lives of America’s youth had been sacrificed for the benefit of the nation’s plutocrats. As Wolfe groped his way back through his personal experiences of the 1920s up on the eighth floor, Masters scribbled on his own yellow legal pads six floors below, pipe clenched between his teeth and rimless spectacles flashing, lambasting Twain for lingering in Europe despite the pleas of William Dean Howells until even Twain’s words could not stop the dreadful momentum of America’s plunge. “He might have called upon that will with which he set about to pay his debts,” Masters wrote in impotent rage, and taken arms against “the filth, which he saw with sufficiently good eyes.” But Twain had preferred to play the clown, “with a clown’s reward” of money and popularity.
One friend at the Chelsea on whom Masters could always count for agreement in such matters was the famous New York painter John Sloan, who shared a top-floor duplex apartment-studio with his tiny wife, Dolly. Masters and Sloan had much in common: both were in their sixties and decades past their best-known achievements, and both were stubbornly determined to continue their work with the same passion and dedication as in their youth. Tall, gangly, bespectacled Sloan had known harder times than Masters had as a boy. The son of a penniless Pennsylvania furniture-maker, Sloan had dropped out of high school to help support his family and had received the bulk of his art training on the job as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Luckily, at the newspaper he had fallen in with a group of like-minded young artists who together came under the influence of the brilliant realist painter Robert Henri. Accepting his role as their teacher, this charismatic Westerner preached the gospel of visual truth. Sending them out to the city’s working-class slums and saloons, where, he insisted, “the realities of life” were most likely to be revealed, he urged the young illustrators to depict not just what they saw but, like Stephen Crane, what they felt about what they saw. Sloan, still struggling to teach himself technique, was glad to hear from Henri that an artist’s level of skill hardly mattered as long as his emotional response to a subject came across. To inform that response, Sloan dutifully devoured the books by Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and Tolstoy that Henri commanded his students to read.
Henri moved to New York in 1902, and his students soon followed. Sloan arrived last, delayed by his m
arriage to Dolly Wall, a penniless part-time prostitute whose diminutive frame and plucky optimism had touched Sloan’s generous heart. Once in New York, he fell in love with the city as a subject and found it satisfying and exciting to depict the nation’s wealthiest metropolis from his poor man’s point of view. His empathetic images of women drying their hair on tenement roofs, pigeons flying across the sky in beautiful formation, and young children playing in Madison Square Park would have greatly pleased William Dean Howells, who had dreamed of American artists recording “the fascinating particulars of city life” during his time at the Chelsea. Sloan painted a portrait of the Chelsea itself, having become captivated by its mysterious, pyramid-topped presence as seen from the top-floor loft he had rented at 165 West Twenty-Third Street (by strange coincidence, the same one Stephen Crane had occupied just before he was hounded out of town).
Sloan’s placement of Dolly in the painting’s foreground, pausing in the midst of hanging laundry to gaze at the Chelsea, would have made Rooftops, Sunset an iconic image for the Fourierist movement if Sloan had only known about Fourier. As it was, he remained largely ignorant of the social and political implications of his work, choosing subjects solely by intuition. If a painting depicted the truth in life, it was beautiful, he believed, and so he found New York art collectors’ preference for misty landscapes and mythical subjects as bewildering as it was frustrating.