New York’s Chelsea Hotel continues to fascinate younger generations drawn not just to its storied history but to those eccentric denizens still hanging on in the face of gentrification and the imminent demise of rent control. Directors Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier bring a reflective inquisitiveness to its ghostly corridors in Dream Walls, an impressionistic documentary imbricating past and present that makes vivid the spirits that still seem to inhabit the place despite hallways stripped down to the sheetrock and walls denuded of its once famed art collection. Handsomely made with love and respect, the documentary adds little to the large body of work devoted to the Hotel but will nonetheless be a popular item for festivals and streaming services.
The Chelsea on West 23rd Street remains synonymous with boho cool much as Rome’s via Veneto still conjures up images of bygone glamour: both locales, sadly, have undergone transformations from which their earlier habituées would recoil. At the Chelsea, the starry litany of names connected to the residential hotel still boggle the mind: Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, William Burroughs, Frida Kahlo, Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious, Virgil Thomson, Alan Ginsberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Nico, Andy Warhol…. In its counterculture heyday, the Chelsea was the culture, welcoming artists and addicts posing as artists with lenient rental fees and the promise of a shared community that would forgive almost every infraction so long as you were Creative.
When the culturally destructive wave of gentrification washed over Manhattan, the Chelsea was an obvious target: the area, once excitedly balanced between chic grunge and gay haven, became transformed by skyrocketing rents, and the area west of the Hotel, once the domain of sex workers and drug pushers, was turned into high-end gallery spaces and the Chelsea Piers. Stanley Bard, the Hotel’s exuberant manager (seen in old interviews) was pushed out in 2007, when its hallowed place in the zeitgeist had already significantly declined; he died a decade later in Boca Raton, as un-Chelsea Hotel a place as one could imagine.
For more than ten years the Chelsea has regularly appeared in the news, fought over by longtime residents about whether to accept the developer’s payoffs before its transformation into a luxury hotel with a fancy restaurant replacing the dowdy El Quijote and a roof spa wiping out all trace of tenants’ overgrown gardens. Most left, others remained to fight for their homes and the spirit of the place, but the fractious battles between residents as well as with the owners have prolonged the renovations which, some credibly suggest, have taken this long in order to make life difficult for the hold-outs.
Dreaming Walls avoids going into the politics of it all; it mentions some of the tensions but tries hard not to appear to take sides between tenants, nor does it get into the rent control debate, and if there is a critique of gentrification here, it’s very sotto voce. Instead, the directors aim to show the place as a palimpsest on which spirits of those long past share the space with some of the people who continue to hold on, such as dancer-choreographer Merle Lister and artists Skye Ferrante, Rose Cory and Bettina Grossman, who died last year and about whom two documentaries have already been made.
Lister is the film’s heart, her stooped figure roaming the stripped-down corridors with her walker and doing her physiotherapy in spaces where she used to create dance performances. Born in Canada, she’s the quintessential older New Yorker, still eager to grasp the creative spirit and interested in speaking with everyone she sees, including construction workers as she checks on the parts of the Hotel under transformation. That means pretty much everywhere apart from behind doors marked “Tenant Occupied,” which appear like quasi-magical spaces defiantly preserving their individualism from the wrecking ball. Some of those apartments retain many of their original fittings, such as the tastefully overblown home of Tenants Association president Zoe Serac Pappas and her husband Nicholas Pappas, whose refined comfort stands in stark contrast to the explosive clutter of Bettina Grossman’s practically unlivable space.
The film weaves together bits of choice historic footage with observational shots of the Hotel’s current state and tenants getting on with their lives. Among the famed figures associated with the place whose spectral images the directors project on the walls, Marilyn Monroe is unsurprisingly included even though it was Arthur Miller who lived there, not Marilyn. Identifying some of the less well-known people, especially at the film’s end, would have been wise, since it’s unlikely younger international audiences will be able to readily identify such important figures as Katherine Dunham.
“Do not go gentle into that good night” urges former resident Dylan Thomas, his dramatic voice heard reciting his most famous poem as if exhorting current tenants to fight on and preserve the Hotel’s true spirit, but the truth is that artistic communities have always been the most vulnerable to economic change, and it’s a long time since the revivifying energy of younger generations has echoed through the hallways. It would have been even more apt had the filmmakers instead included lines from another former tenant, Edgar Lee Masters, whose poem “The Hotel Chelsea” warns, “Soon this Chelsea Hotel / Will vanish before the city’s merchant greed, / Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead / More lofty walls will swell… / what peace and what lament / These rooms knew, long obscured / Will be more lost when fifty years from hence / The place thereof will have no memory”. That was published in 1936, and while the Chelsea’s numerous chroniclers like van Elmbt and Duverdier ensure that the memory remains, merchant greed will always do its best to destroy or commodify what it can never understand.
Directors: Amélie van Elmbt, Maya Duverdier
With: Merle Lister Levine, Zoe Serac Pappas, Nicholas Pappas, Rose Cory, Susan Kleinsinger, Joe Corey, Gerald Busby, Skye Ferrante, Eugenie Sappho, Steve Willis, Bettina Grossman, Gina Healy, Pablo Martinez
Producers: Hanne Phlypo, Quentin Laurent
Co-producers: Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Simone van den Broek, David Herdies, Michael Krotkiewski, Javier Packer Comyn
Executive producer: Lori Cheatle
Cinematography: Joachim Philippe, Virginie Surdej
Editing: Alain Dessauvage, Julie Naas, Marie-Hélène Dozo
Music: Michael Andrews, K?pa
Sound: Ted Krotkiewski, Valérie Le Docte, Patrick Southern, Matt Sutton, Deanna Williams, Taylor Roy
Production company: Clin d’oeil films (Belgium), Les Films de l’oeil sauvage (France), Media International (USA), Basalt Film (The Netherlands), Momento Film (Sweden), in association with Hard Working Movies (USA)
World sales: Dogwoof
Venue: Berlinale (Panorama)
In English
80 minutes
