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The next best thing to having a room key to the Chelsea Hotel during each of its famousand infamousdecades The Chelsea Hotel, since its founding by a visionary French architect in 1884, has been an icon of American invention a cultural dynamo and haven for the counterculture, all in one astonishing building. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them John Sloan, Edgar Lee Masters, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well Why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists community in the known world Inside the Dream Palace is the intimate and definitive story.



About the Author

Sherill Tippins

Sherill Tippins is the author of Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel, and of February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee Under One Roof in Wartime America. She lives in New York City.

You can learn more about Sherill at sherilltippins.com, and you can follow the story of the Chelsea Hotel at http://on.fb.me/18i1net.

AUTHOR Q & A

Why and how did you come to write about the Chelsea Hotel?

Like many New Yorkers, I was initially thrilled, during my early years as a New York City resident (in the late '70s and early '80s) , to venture through the doors of the famous artists' residence, to take a look at the art in the lobby and to attend parties upstairs. Over time, however, I ceased to think about the hotel. It was only seven or eight years ago that my curiosity about the place was piqued again. A friend's enthusiasm for the place and his recommendation that I look into its origins prompted me to do some research. Right away, a host of bizarre stories turned up -- everything from paeans to the Chelsea as a "living temple of humanity" to a report of a concert pianist's wife who cut off her hand with a pair of shears and then leaped to her death from the hotel's fifth floor. Still, I resisted what promised to be an enormous research project, until the day I was crossing West 23rd Street during a rainstorm and was stopped cold in mid-intersection by the flash of an enormous bolt of forked lightning directly above the hotel. One doesn't ignore an omen like that.



There are some fantastic anecdotes in the book about artists who inspired each other. Is there one unlikely or surprising collaboration in particular that struck you?

Perhaps one of the most surprising to me was that between the artist Arthur B. Davies and the socialites and arts patrons Lizzie Bliss and Abby Rockefeller in the 1920s. Davies led a fascinating life: married to one woman who was raising their children in upstate New York, married to another with their daughter hidden away in Europe, and romantically involved with a beautiful young singer who posed for him in his top-floor Chelsea studio. Davies, who had been the greatest force behind the seminal 1913 Armory Show, had a great passion for the modern artists. He had filled his studio with so many paintings and sculptures by Cézanne, Seurat, and Picasso that he eventually had to rent a second studio in order to house all his treasures. As a result, when Davies died unexpectedly, during a visit to his second wife in Europe, Rockefeller and Bliss were moved to commemorate his vision by together creating New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1929.



Why do you think the Chelsea attracted so many legendary residents?

The Chelsea is, above all, comfortable



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