Chelsea Hotel in New York a haven for artists and free thinkers

Before Patti Smith, before Allen Ginsberg, before Thomas Wolfe, before O. Henry, the Chelsea Hotel in New York City was populated by 80 convivial families of various levels of wealth, brought together by an idealistic board partly inspired by a French philosopher so radical some thought him mad.

That was back at the turn of the century - the 20th century - which is where Sherill Tippins begins her engaging, readable history, Inside the Dream Palace. It tells the story of the remarkable building, opened in 1884 on 23rd Street, and its legendary inhabitants, but it does something more, presenting an oft-overlooked current of American utopianism, one that was urban, creative and surprisingly long-lived.

At the beginning of it all was architect Philip Hubert, born in France and raised in America by followers of Charles Fourier, a 19th-century French advocate of communal living. Fourier outlined complex social structures that would create an egalitarian, artistic society - ideas that took hold with the Transcendentalists and other American utopians, until they learned that he encouraged free sex and orgies. Hubert held onto Fourier's philosophy - the social, not sexual, elements - through his rise to become one of New York's most successful architects. He purchased the oversized property where he built the 12-storey Chelsea Assn. Building.

It was the city's largest residential building, housing lower-class workers in small suites, artists within glass-walled studios on the ninth floor, and wealthy families with 3,000-square-foot, 12-room apartments. Hubert also designed places to mix: rooms for the women and men on the ground floor, a restaurant and a rooftop garden.

"There would be all types of New Yorkers," Tippins writes, "the dark- and the light-spirited, the shrewd and the innocent, the scarred and the pure."

So it was set in motion: a place built beautifully, designed to bridge class divisions and to value the arts. Hubert would not have imagined Andy Warhol holding court in the restaurant, Dylan Thomas stumbling drunkenly down the halls, or composer George Kleinsinger's room transformed into a literal jungle with exotic plants, birds and snakes - but what he created was big enough to house them all and so many more.