Explore the real-world places that appear in Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include SoHo Loft District, The High Line, Chelsea Art Galleries, The West Village, Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle and 8 more.
SoHo, Lower Manhattan — Frank and Cleo's marital home
Frank, a successful older advertising executive, sweeps the young, radiant British artist Cleo off her feet and installs her in his spacious SoHo loft. The loft becomes the central domestic arena of the novel — the place where the wildly mismatched couple tries to construct a marriage, where Cleo's bohemian spirit chafes against Frank's ordered life, and where their fundamental incompatibilities quietly accumulate beneath the surface of love and good intentions.
SoHo's cast-iron loft buildings were originally industrial spaces built in the mid-19th century for manufacturing and warehousing. Artists colonized the abandoned lofts in the 1960s and 1970s, famously making the neighborhood a hub of avant-garde art. By the 2000s, the area had been thoroughly gentrified into one of Manhattan's most expensive residential and retail zones.
SoHo remains one of Manhattan's most fashionable neighborhoods, its cobblestone streets lined with luxury boutiques and galleries. Many historic cast-iron buildings survive and are landmarked. Living lofts in the area command multi-million-dollar price tags.
Visit: SoHo Cast Iron Historic District (historic site)
Gansevoort St to 34th St, West Side — a place of longing and wandering
Characters in the novel drift through Manhattan's new urban landscapes searching for connection and meaning, and the High Line embodies this aimless beauty. Cleo walks its elevated length in moments of emotional displacement, watching the city from above and feeling simultaneously part of it and estranged from it — a metaphor for her experience as a young British woman trying to belong in New York and in a marriage that doesn't quite fit her.
The High Line was originally an elevated freight rail line built in the 1930s to carry meat and goods through the Meatpacking District and West Chelsea. It fell out of use in the 1980s and was saved from demolition by community activists who envisioned it as a public park. It opened to the public in 2009.
The High Line is one of New York City's most beloved public spaces, attracting millions of visitors annually. It stretches 1.45 miles from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street and features gardens, public art installations, and sweeping views of the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline.
Visit: The High Line (park)
West 20s between 10th and 11th Avenues — Cleo's creative world
Cleo, a painter still finding her artistic identity, inhabits the world of Chelsea's gallery scene. She attends openings, drinks wine amid white walls and conceptual work, and navigates the particular social anxiety of being a young artist who is becoming better known as someone's wife than as a creator in her own right. The galleries represent both her aspiration and her growing frustration as her identity becomes subsumed by her marriage to the powerful Frank.
Chelsea became New York's dominant gallery district in the 1990s when dealers like Matthew Marks and Larry Gagosian relocated from SoHo, drawn by larger, cheaper warehouse spaces. By the 2000s, the neighborhood contained over 200 galleries and had become the center of the international contemporary art market.
Chelsea remains the heart of the New York gallery world, home to dozens of blue-chip and emerging galleries. The area hosts major art fairs and exhibition cycles that draw collectors and art lovers from around the world. Galleries are concentrated along West 21st through 27th Streets between 10th and 11th Avenues.
Visit: Chelsea Gallery District (landmark)
West Village, Manhattan — bohemian domesticity and close friendships
The West Village serves as the intimate neighborhood backdrop for some of the novel's closest friendships and quieter domestic scenes. Characters meet for coffee, walk tree-lined streets between appointments and heartaches, and inhabit the peculiar New York fantasy of a village within a city. Mellors uses the neighborhood's beauty and desirability to underscore the gap between the lives her characters perform and the emotional chaos beneath.
The West Village has been a haven for artists, writers, and bohemians since the early 20th century. It was a center of the Beat generation and later the gay rights movement — the Stonewall Inn sits on its eastern edge. Its winding, pre-grid streets and Federal-style townhouses give it a distinctly European character.
The West Village is among the most expensive and picturesque neighborhoods in Manhattan. Its streets are home to acclaimed restaurants, boutiques, and a thriving social scene. Despite its costs, it retains much of the architectural character and intimate scale that has made it beloved for over a century.
Visit: West Village Historic District (landmark)
76th St & Madison Ave, Upper East Side — adult glamour and marital performance
Frank, a man of expensive tastes and old-world instincts, takes Cleo to places like Bemelmans to impress her and to inhabit the version of himself he most wants to project. The bar's hushed opulence and mural-covered walls represent the establishment world that Frank belongs to and that Cleo finds both seductive and suffocating. Scenes in the novel's elegant drinking establishments illuminate the transactional dynamics quietly at work beneath the couple's romantic courtship.
Bemelmans Bar opened in 1947 inside The Carlyle Hotel, which has been a fixture of Upper East Side luxury since 1930. The bar's iconic murals were painted by Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the Madeline children's books, in exchange for a year's lodging. The Carlyle has hosted presidents, royalty, and celebrities for nearly a century.
Bemelmans Bar remains one of New York's most celebrated cocktail bars, famous for its murals, live piano music, and timeless atmosphere. It is consistently ranked among the best bars in the world and requires reservations. The Carlyle Hotel continues to operate as one of Manhattan's most prestigious addresses.
Visit: Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle (restaurant)
Madison Avenue, Midtown Manhattan — Frank's professional domain
Frank's world of advertising — his professional identity, his power, and his money — is rooted in the Midtown Manhattan office culture that built his success long before Cleo arrived. His work gives him authority, structure, and a sense of purpose that contrasts sharply with Cleo's more ambiguous artistic pursuits. The novel explores how his professional confidence masks deep insecurities, and how his Midtown certainty is destabilized by his marriage to someone who lives by entirely different rules.
Madison Avenue became synonymous with the American advertising industry in the mid-20th century, giving rise to the term 'Mad Men.' Agencies including BBDO, McCann, and Young & Rubicam established landmark offices along the avenue. The street's association with advertising culture became a shorthand for corporate persuasion and consumer capitalism.
While many major agencies have relocated to other parts of Manhattan, Madison Avenue retains its association with media and advertising. The corridor remains a center of corporate New York, with offices, luxury hotels, and flagship retail lining its length. The term 'Madison Avenue' continues to be used as a cultural shorthand for the advertising industry.
Ludlow & Orchard Streets, Lower East Side — youth, drinking, and dissolution
The novel traces Cleo's spiral into drinking and aimlessness partly through the dive bars and late-night venues of the Lower East Side, where youth and recklessness offer temporary relief from her marital unhappiness. Characters drink too much and stay out too late, seeking in the dim anonymity of bars something they cannot find at home. Mellors is unflinching about the seductive pull of alcohol as a social lubricant and an escape hatch from a life that doesn't fit.
The Lower East Side was a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immortalized in the tenement buildings that still line its streets. By the 1990s and 2000s, it transformed into one of Manhattan's most active nightlife districts, with bars and music venues colonizing former storefronts and delis.
The Lower East Side remains a hub of bars, restaurants, and live music venues. The neighborhood balances its immigrant heritage — preserved at the Tenement Museum — with a thriving hospitality scene. Streets like Ludlow, Orchard, and Rivington are lined with some of New York's most visited drinking establishments.
Visit: Lower East Side Nightlife District (landmark)
Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn — artistic community and alternative lives
Several of Cleo and Frank's friends inhabit the Brooklyn creative world of Williamsburg, representing an alternative path to the one the couple has chosen. Artists, musicians, and writers living on tighter budgets in larger spaces embody a kind of freedom and authenticity that Cleo sometimes envies. The contrast between Manhattan's wealth and Brooklyn's bohemian aspirations runs through the novel as a quiet question about what kind of life is worth living.
Williamsburg began transforming from an industrial working-class neighborhood into an arts enclave in the late 1990s, as artists priced out of Manhattan crossed the East River seeking affordable studio and living space. By the mid-2000s, it had become the defining neighborhood of millennial creative culture in New York City.
Williamsburg is now one of Brooklyn's most expensive and developed neighborhoods, with luxury condominiums and national retail chains having largely replaced the DIY art scene that defined it. Bedford Avenue and its surrounding streets remain lively commercial corridors, though the neighborhood's character has substantially changed from its early 2000s identity.
Visit: Williamsburg Arts & Cultural District (landmark)
59th to 110th Streets, Manhattan — reflection and romantic illusion
Central Park appears in the novel as a space where characters seek clarity amid the noise of their lives. Cleo walks the park in moments of emotional crisis, the beauty of the landscape offering a temporary suspension of her problems. Mellors uses the park's seasonal transformations as a backdrop against which the characters' own emotional seasons play out — the first flush of love against autumn leaves, the bleakness of a troubled marriage against a grey winter sky.
Central Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, opening in 1858 as America's first major landscaped public park. It covers 843 acres and was constructed on terrain that was largely rocky and swampy. The park displaced approximately 1,600 residents, many of them poor Black and Irish immigrants, who were forcibly removed from the land.
Central Park receives approximately 42 million visitors per year, making it one of the most visited urban parks in the world. It contains 36 bridges, numerous lakes and meadows, the Metropolitan Museum of Art on its eastern edge, and hundreds of acres of woodland and manicured landscape. The Central Park Conservancy manages its ongoing restoration and maintenance.
Visit: Central Park (park)
8 West 8th St, Greenwich Village — the world of serious art-making
Cleo's identity as a painter — serious, trained, ambitious — is rooted in the Greenwich Village art school tradition. As her marriage to Frank threatens to subsume her creative life, her relationship to making art and to artistic community becomes increasingly fraught. The novel interrogates what it costs a young woman artist to love a powerful, consuming man, and whether creative identity can survive the gravitational pull of a relationship that wants to make you into something smaller.
The New York Studio School was founded in 1964 in the historic building that was formerly the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is dedicated to rigorous, long-term studio training in the tradition of gesture drawing and painting. The building itself has deep roots in Greenwich Village's artistic history, having also housed the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney studio.
The New York Studio School continues to operate at 8 West 8th Street, offering MFA programs, marathon drawing sessions, and public lectures. The school maintains its commitment to traditional studio practice in an era of conceptual and digital art. Its gallery hosts regular exhibitions of student and faculty work.
Visit: New York Studio School (museum)
Queens, New York — arrival and departure, belonging and foreignness
Cleo arrives in New York through JFK, and the airport functions symbolically as the threshold she crosses when she enters a life she did not plan. As a young British woman in America, her foreignness is always present — she does not quite belong in the world Frank has built, and the airport represents both the adventure of her transplantation and the permanent slight unease of never being fully at home. The possibility of departure hovers over her throughout the novel.
John F. Kennedy International Airport opened in 1948 as Idlewild Airport and was renamed in 1963 following the president's assassination. It became one of the busiest international airports in the world, serving as the primary gateway for transatlantic travel into New York City. Its terminals have been repeatedly rebuilt and modernized over the decades.
JFK handles approximately 60 million passengers annually and serves over 90 airlines with flights to more than 150 destinations. A major renovation project is underway to consolidate and modernize its terminals into a unified world-class airport. It remains the main entry point for most international travelers arriving in New York.
Upper East Side / Midtown — self-examination and the talking cure
Therapy sessions are woven through the novel as characters try to articulate and understand their own desires, failures, and patterns. Cleo and Frank separately seek the kind of clarity that their relationship cannot provide, sitting across from therapists in the quiet Upper East Side offices that have become a fixture of affluent Manhattan life. Mellors uses these scenes to give the characters moments of hard, unmediated self-knowledge — the most honest conversations in a novel full of beautiful evasions.
The Upper East Side, particularly the stretch near Park Avenue between 60th and 90th Streets, became known as 'the couch corridor' due to its extraordinary concentration of psychoanalysts and therapists. This stemmed from the mid-20th century migration of European psychoanalysts to New York, many of whom were Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe and settled in the neighborhood.
The Upper East Side remains home to a large number of mental health practitioners, though the density has spread throughout Manhattan. Therapy has become increasingly normalized and culturally central in New York City, with the neighborhood's tradition of psychoanalytic practice continuing alongside newer therapeutic modalities. Many offices still occupy the gracious pre-war apartment buildings of the East 70s and 80s.
145 West Broadway, TriBeCa — the creative class at dinner
The social world of Cleopatra and Frankenstein is one of long dinners, bottles of wine, and the performance of ease among the creative and moneyed classes. The Odeon, TriBeCa's legendary brasserie, is precisely the kind of place where Frank's advertising world and Cleo's art world overlap — where deals and affairs and friendships are conducted over steak frites in a room where everyone is always looking to see who else has arrived.
The Odeon opened in 1980 and immediately became a landmark of New York's downtown scene, famously featured on the cover of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City. It attracted Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the entire 1980s downtown arts world. The restaurant survived the transformation of TriBeCa from an industrial district to one of Manhattan's wealthiest neighborhoods.
The Odeon continues to operate at 145 West Broadway and remains a beloved institution of downtown Manhattan dining. It serves a classic French-American brasserie menu and retains much of its original Art Deco interior. The restaurant is a destination for both longtime New Yorkers and visitors seeking a taste of the city's cultural history.
Visit: The Odeon (restaurant)
More by Coco Mellors: All Coco Mellors books
More novels set in New York City: Browse all New York City books on Map A Story
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