Sherrill tippins biography

If The Eagles’ “Hotel California” is the place where one can “check out anytime you like, but you can never leave,” then New York City’s Chelsea Hotel may be where you can check out anytime you like, but it never leaves you. With Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel, author Sherill Tippins has produced, not just a history of the building, but its definitive biography, a thorough, engrossing telling of the lives the Chelsea intersected, the dreams it inspired and dashed, and the legacies it launched.

When the Chelsea opened in 1884, there truly was no other place like it: A mix of Gothic and Queen Anne styles, walls three-feet thick, fireproof plaster, intricate ironwork; and modern conveniences too: Otis elevators, 1,800 electric lights, gas cooking and “speaking tubes for easy communication.”