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

Author:Sherill Tippins [Tippins, Sherill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9780618726349
Amazon: 0618726349
Barnesnoble: 0618726349
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

8

Naked Lunch

Jesus died for somebody’s sins

but not mine.

—PATTI SMITH, “Oath”

TO THE BELEAGUERED COUPLE who unlocked its door, the tiny chamber assigned to them wasn’t just a room. It was sanctuary, its interior as charged with possibility as Rimbaud’s Parisian atelier. Taking their first steps into the high-ceilinged space, sparsely furnished with a narrow bed, a chipped sink, and a brown bureau topped by an old TV, they sensed the lingering energy—the thought-forms, as Harry Smith would soon explain—of others who had washed up there and launched their own new lives in decades past. Patti and Robert dropped their belongings near the door, curled up together beneath the bed’s thin chenille bedspread, and slept.

In the days that followed, the two twenty-two-year-olds discovered how lucky they were to have found the Chelsea, as, intrigued by this oddly androgynous pair, some of the hotel’s senior members drew them under their collective wing. Harry Smith turned up early to prescribe saltwater rinses for Mapplethorpe’s infected mouth, launching into a discussion of salt’s alchemical significance as he demonstrated how to clear the brown water spewing into their sink. Peggy Biderman put Robert in touch with a resident doctor who treated him for the clap despite Patti’s confession that they couldn’t pay right away. Sandy Daley, the stately blond photographer-filmmaker who lived next door, invited the hungry couple for breakfast in her enormous studio. Robert was entranced by the sun-filled space, painted white and minimally furnished with a Japanese-style mattress on the floor and a few of Warhol’s helium-filled silver pillows floating in the air. Breakfast at Sandy’s became a daily ritual, with Robert and Sandy paging through photography books while Patti borrowed the shower to get ready for work.

It sometimes seemed to Patti that, aside from Biderman, who had a part-time job at the Museum of Modern Art’s bookshop, she was the only officially employed person in the entire hotel. But she liked her job at Scribner’s, which was housed in an exquisite Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue—an offspring of the Chelsea building, one might say, since it had been designed by Philip Hubert’s former apprentice Ernest Flagg. Walking to work, Smith got to know the used-record stores, thrift shops, and faded cafés along Twenty-Third Street. When she returned home, she lingered in the lobby to watch the parade of rock musicians, publicists, visiting Brits with their dogs off leash, and weekend dads with their kids in tow. Soon she was able to identify not only famous guests, such as members of the rock bands Canned Heat, Santana, and Three Dog Night, but also some of the nonfamous residents: plump, hearty Helen Johnson, an expert on the history of African-American theater, frequently seen with pianist Eubie Blake; Elizabeth Hawes, a Depression-era fashion designer who had given her gowns names like The Revolt of the Masses and Five-Year Plan; the moody, theatrical, Russian-born papier-mâché sculptress Eugenie Gershoy; and Eliot the junkie, known for running naked through the corridors upstairs.

Sitting in a corner of the lobby,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.