Inside the Dream Palace

Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel (2014) by Sherill  Tippins. The Chelsea Hotel was founded by a visionary French architect in 1884. Since then, generations of artists have cohabited and created there, including Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol and Sam Shepard. 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. This book starts slowly, as it name-checks some now-obscure 19th-century pioneers who inhabited the Chelsea hotel, but it gathers momentum as it accelerates toward the present, with many famous artists, musicians and other creative people making appearances at one point or another. It is a phenomenal story that grabs the interest and holds it. Grade: B+