There are many layers to the mystique of the Chelsea Hotel. Long before it became a hipster hangout, the 12-story, 250-room fortress, built in the 1880s, was home to Mark Twain (though come to thin…
. Long before it became a hipster hangout, the 12-story, 250-room fortress, built in the 1880s, was home to Mark Twain . In the ’50s, the Chelsea played host to assorted literary figures, the first of whom to lend it a dissolute aura was Dylan Thomas, who was living the lush life in room 205 when he became ill and died in 1953. The beats moved in , and so did Arthur Miller after he divorced Marilyn Monroe and Arthur C. Clarke while he was writing “2001: A Space Odyssey.
Another layer that’s not so incidental. I’d lived in New York for several years, and had walked by the Chelsea dozens of times, when I found myself staring up at it one day from across the street. And what I realized, for the first time, is that it’s a drop-dead gorgeous piece of architecture. The red brick, the black metal balconies, the turrets, the awesome width of it — it’s like some Victorian Gothic” is a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel that deals with almost none of this stuff.
In the documentary, however, the gloomy splendor of it all is marked by the unaesthetic signifiers of renovation: hanging sheets of plastic, exposed pipes, half-finished walls. Anyone who’s ever done a major home renovation knows that you live, for a while, in a state of construction limbo, poised between what your home was and what it’s going to be. And “Dreaming Walls” uses the stately disarray of the Chelsea renovation as a metaphor for a key moment of cultural limbo.
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