Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel

A radical renovation of a famous New York hotel works in the move dream walls as a metaphor for how gentrification rips the soul out of the city.

The gentrification of New York has been a favorite subject for film and television directors for quite some time. See, for example, David Simons The devil (2017-2019), which shows how Times Square has gone from a big brothel to a shopping paradise in fifty years. Or the TV remake of Spike Lee She must have it (2017), in which black Brooklyn residents watch in dismay as real estate prices rise with the arrival of white yuppies.

Also the documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel shows how the Big Apple is irreversibly turning into a haven for the wealthy. For decades, the Chelsea Hotel was an affordable bastion for creatives, but today it’s a shadow of what it once was.

It’s no mystery why celebrities like Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, and Marilyn Monroe loved staying here: many apartments in the 19th-century structure offer sweeping views of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Filmmakers Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt show the glory of yesteryear in the opening scene by projecting the stars of the past onto a chimney at the top of the building. In archive footage, Patti Smith mumbles how poet Dylan Thomas – ‘one of my heroes’ – stayed at the hotel in the 1950s.

A major renovation is currently underway. The apartments are pimped and will soon be rented for colossal sums. Current residents – mostly elderly – are being bullied by the landlord. Among them are many people who still remember the free port of yesteryear very well. For example, the creators discuss with a choreographer who thinks of the time when the avant-garde was rampant in New York. Meanwhile, a camera wanders alone through the dilapidated hallways.

The unique atmosphere of the past has been replaced by spaces filled with garbage bags and construction equipment. Perhaps the visual metaphors of Duverdier and Van Elmbt are a bit exaggerated. But it also makes their own commitment to the hotel tangible. They’re trying to capture something that threatens to elude them – a priceless piece of history – before it disappears.

But in reality it is already too late. All of these creators depicting the gentrification of New York should perhaps have started 20 years ago. This makes the documentary even more bittersweet. In another sense dream walls however, very satisfying: the film fulfills the obnoxious desire of many people to intervene during the renovation of a memorable building.