2026-10-19 · Telegram (in Russian), t.me/iliathoughts/709

The Chelsea Hotel and Fourier's utopia in the heart of New York

Continuing the story of the Chelsea Hotel in New York.

It was originally built not as a hotel but as a residential building. The architect and developer, Philip Hubert, was impressed by the ideas of the French philosopher Charles Fourier, one of the founders of utopian socialism.

What was the idea?

Fourier believed that people should live in autonomous communities that bring together people of different skills, professions and means. Together they form a self-sufficient group in which you can not just live but also grow.

At the Chelsea they tried to implement this idea. People with different incomes and professions moved in, including the workers who built the building itself. There were shared spaces, and on the top floor they equipped studios for artists.

And for 20 years the project existed quite successfully. But gradually financial problems began, apparently with the need to chip in for the first major repairs. In 1905 the cooperative went bankrupt, and the building became a hotel.

In general, the end of the 19th century seems to have been a rather romantic time. It produced such utopian projects both in the center of capitalist New York and in Moscow, where industrialists built housing, schools and hospitals for their workers.

People tried to figure out how to organize society differently. Sometimes they even put their own money into these experiments.

I don't know, maybe our time is the same, but I don't feel that romanticism.