Like many an only child, Nicolaia Rips grew up largely in the company of adults. While other Manhattan youngsters were being herded into Mommy and Me classes and the soccer leagues at Pier 40, Ms. Rips, who grew up in the Chelsea Hotel, was spending her afternoons with the unruly oddballs on West 23rd Street.

There was Robert Lambert, a painter, and his irritable half-paralyzed screenwriting friend, nicknamed Mr. Crafty, who traded insults and nicknamed Ms. Rips “Lttle Crafty,” awarding her entry into their tiny, profane club of two. There was the Angel, a young man whose uniform was a pair of enormous white wings and a sort of diaper.

There was the Capitan, a man of mysterious, and probably inflated, martial origins who had a black Newfoundland that Ms. Rips would ride through the halls. Arthur Weinstein, the night-life impresario, was the father of her babysitter Dahlia; he didn’t say much, but every now and then would toss Ms. Rips a chocolate bar.

Now 17, Ms. Rips has written a memoir about her time there. The jacket copy for “Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel” calls her a “bohemian Eloise for our times,” billing that brings to mind a self-consciously precocious imp.