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Not a single mention of the Chelsea

The partial Literary Map of Manhattan is now available.  You can complete your map by adding these additional fictional characters who resided at and/or visited the Chelsea.   Judging from the list it seems that for some authors the Hotel Chelsea is synonymous with crime.

Robin Hudson, the female detective in The Chelsea Girl Murders — Sparkle Hayter
Daisy Dalrymple, the female detective in The Case of the Murdered Muckraker – Carola Dunn
Jack,  Found in the Street – Patricia Highsmith
Hank Thompson, the bad guy in Caught Stealing – Charlie Huston

Matt in The Devil Knows You’re Dead — Lawrence Block

Most of the characters in Chelsea Horror Hotel — Dee Dee Ramone

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One response to “Not a single mention of the Chelsea”

  1. sparkle hayter Avatar
    sparkle hayter

    The Chelsea has its outlaw identity, but I didn’t set the book there because I associate it first and foremost with crime (friends, art, hilarity would rank well ahead of crime on my list). I set it there because I was in inescapable self-imposed deadline prison in my apartment there and it enabled me to combine work with home and pleasure, to have a bit of social life while I was writing a book under the gun.
    But there was crime, of course, mainly consensual “crime.” A notorious Madam worked out of the Chelsea until Stanley kicked her out, and a friend of Herbert Huncke’s ran an illegal gambling den there for a while. There were drugs. I believe Clifford irving was arrested there for the Howard Hughes autobiography fraud. Murders were quite rare. A neighbor of mine, a voluptuous South American woman who inspired the Lucia character in Chelsea Girl Murders, was shot in the stomach in the lobby one day. It was said to be a mob hit. She survived, so either it went awry or it was meant as a warning. If it was the latter, it didn’t work, as she went to the FBI and ended up disappearing into the Federal Witness Protection Program. She was very flamboyant, dramatic and flashily dressed, and it was hard to imagine her disappearing into anything.

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