Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel a Negligible Add to the Fabled Building's Canon

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Beauty and loss hold hands in Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel, an intimate and impressionistic documentary about New York’s storied Chelsea Hotel from Belgian filmmakers, Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier. The film focuses on a handful of remaining residents, holdouts in the rent-controlled apartments, immersed in an apparently interminable renovation.

Images of famous residents from decades past projected onto the walls, mixed with snippets of archival footage and current encounters with the last remaining residents, in their overstuffed apartments or in the plastic-sheeted hallways.

Even at a short 80 minutes, the film feels casual and fragmentary. The filmmakers presume an audience already familiar with the well-chronicled red-brick West 23rd Street monument to New York’s bohemian past, focusing instead on its faded grandeur and chaotic reconstruction. One young construction worker describes it as “a lot of history is in this building and ghosts going around.”

When it first opened in 1884, the 12-story building, then the tallest in New York, was intended as a utopian housing cooperative with rooftop gardens, mixing social classes and artists, created by the idealistic French American architect, Philip Hubert.

In 1905, it was repurposed as a combination apartment building and hotel, and, in the post-Second World War era, emerged a kind of ad hoc cultural Petrie dish, described by Life Magazine in 1964 as “New York’s most illustrious third-rate hotel” and by another publication as “the Ellis Island of the avant-garde.”

Through the sixties and seventies, art stars, rock and rollers, writers and filmmakers mixed with drug users and sex workers, all subsidized by guests in the expensive guest rooms, and overseen by co-owner and manager Stanley Bard, who was finally pushed out in 2007.

The Hyatt and the Hilton chains could only dream of the free publicity the place has generated over the years. The hotel’s name has been cited in popular songs (Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan).

Writers from Mark Twain to Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Arthur C. Clarke, William Burroughs, and Sam Shepherd lived and wrote there. Filmmakers (Stanley Kubrick), musicians (Virgil Thomson, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Madonna, Sid Vicious) and artists (Jasper Johns, Frida Kahlo, Robert Mapplethorpe) shared its hallways. The building has been the subject of numerous films, memoirs, a coffee table book and at least four book-length histories.

In this iteration, we follow a few of those resident holdouts, primarily the Canadian-born dancer-choreographer Merle Lister, now using a walker, while she practices her calisthenics or chats with the construction workers.

She even recreates part of her work, Dance of the Spirits, first performed on the stairs of the Chelsea to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the building. We meet other artists such as Skye Ferrante, who creates wire sculptures. We also meet trans performance artist Rose Cory and painter Bettina Grossman, an artist long associated with the Chelsea, who died last year at 94. Famously, her apartment-studio was so stuffed with her artwork, she took to sleeping in the hallway.

Dreaming Walls touches on stimulating ideas, encouraging viewers to dive down any number of rabbit holes: The relationship between bohemia and gentrification, the commitment to a creative lifestyle in the absence of money, the beauty of decrepitude.

But the filmmakers’ stylish vagueness is frustrating, a fanciful and sometimes baffling scratch across the surface. Flickering images of Marilyn Monroe on the walls suggest she stayed here, though she didn’t. Her playwright husband Arthur Miller did live there after their breakup, and decades later wrote a resonant recollection of the hotel’s spirit of “scary and optimistic chaos.”

The film leaves its mostly elderly residents in a swirl of drywall dust and a limbo-like uncertainty, which could use an update. The hotel began its gradual re-opening in February, days after the film’s premiere at the Berlin film festival. You can stay there again, in a tiny room or fully appointed suite, for between $300 and $3,000 a night, and listen to see if the renovated walls can still speak.

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. Directed by Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier. Opens July 8 in Toronto (Hot Docs Cinema), Saskatoon (Broadway) and in other cities across Canada in the coming weeks.