Dreaming Walls: Old New York versus the New

 

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (2022)

Directed by Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt

Magnolia Pictures, 80 minutes, not-rated

★★★★

 

Dreaming Walls is billed as a documentary, but it’s also a ghost story. The film looks at both a building and a cavalcade of artists, beatniks, bohemians, counterculture figures, celebrities, misfits, poets, punk rockers, and radicals who lived at or passed through New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. That’s a long list that includes: Dylan (both Bob D. and D. Thomas), Leonard Cohen, Salvador Dali, Jane Fonda, Alan Ginsberg, Ethan Hawke, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning, Janis Joplin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bette Midler, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Ochs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and most of his “superstars.” Warhol famously used the hotel as the backdrop for his 1965 underground film Chelsea Girls.

 

Dreaming Walls is all the more a ghost story courtesy of the decision of directors Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt to shoot much of it as “layered” movie with sharp focus present-day footage with shadowy stock film montage of past residents running in the background. The eerie soundtrack of Michael Andrews lends a paranormal feel, as does our discomfort at viewing the remaining fulltime residents of the Chelsea puttering their way around the construction rubble as the old 1883 building is slowly converted into a mid-century modern themed luxury hotel. With few exceptions–like multimedia artist Steve Willis–most of the residents living in rent-controlled spaces are husks of their younger selves whose occupancy will expire as soon as they do. We see artist Bettina Grossman and dancer/choreographer Merle Lister-Levine, who is our voiceover for much of the film, negotiating long detours with their walkers or seeking help with getting their parcels to upper rooms because of out-of-service elevators. Speaking of ghosts, 94-year-old Grossman died in 2022, as did Lister-Levine’s elderly husband. If you need any more ghosts, the Chelsea Hotel is where Sid Vicious was accused of murdering Nancy Spungen.

 

Whether or not you think Sid killed Nancy, the Chelsea Hotel was a dodgy place from the 1970s on. Sex, drugs, wild parties, deferred maintenance, the anarchic views of residents, celebrity tantrums, and a laissez-faire manager turned the Chelsea into something resembling a decaying/decadent commune. Dreaming Walls provides a quick overview of the Chelsea’s  circular path from a Gilded Age luxury hotel in 1883 to a residency hotel in the early 20^th century to a haven for non-conformists from the 1930s into the early 21^st century, and back to a luxury hotel after 2022. Plan on about $600/night if you want to stay there during high season these days. Through all of this old debates rage: old New York versus modern New York, gentrification versus cheap lodging, the morality of displacing long-time residents….

 

Whatever its iteration, it’s easy to see the Chelsea is, as architects say, a building with good bones. Amazing grill work, light fixtures, lounges, and public gathering places have been home to ground floor concerts, restaurants, office spaces, retail shops, and easy access for offbeat New Yorkers who weren’t living in Greenwich Village. 

 

Through it all viewers can’t help but think about the famous question posed by theologian/historian Francis Schaeffer in 1976: How shall we then live? As we hear Grossman speak of hanging original art in the staircase or watch barely mobile Lister pose a dancer draped over a railing, are we experiencing a reminder of how to live in a creative community or the last light of a played out aesthetic?

 

However we come down on such questions, we know the answer to where things are headed. It says volumes to know that this documentary won awards in Europe, but was off the radar screen in the United States. In the showdown between affordability and what the market will bear, counterculture and mainstream culture, and bohemians versus capitalists, on whom/what would you place your bets? Dreaming Walls is a fascinating film in which the final ghost is the Chelsea Hotel itself. The old Chelsea has become an artifact. Depending upon your personal values you can chant “The Chelsea is dead” or Long live the Chelsea.”

 

Rob Weir