Chelsea: The Art and Commerce of One Hot Block NYTimes

Jack Fuchs remembers when the only profession being practiced along far West 25th Street was the world’s oldest.

“There were streetwalkers on 11th Avenue, and every three or four years something would go wrong, I suppose, and you’d find a body in a parking lot,” said Mr. Fuchs, a no-nonsense landlord who owns a large chunk of property between 10th and 11th Avenues. “Let’s just say it was not a place where you’d want to spend much time.”

On an unseasonably warm fall Thursday little more than a decade later, you could have found about 500 bodies, all very much alive, packed onto the same block by nightfall. Some emerged from Cadillac Escalades and Hummer limousines. Many were clothed in Prada and Marc Jacobs, accessorized by the spectral glow of their BlackBerrys. Besides English — “Sweetie! I just saw you at Gagosian!” — they spoke (and thumb-typed) French and Japanese and Russian.

They filled the street as if it had been closed down for a fair, but there was no funnel cake for sale. Instead, at Bortolami Dayan, a cavernous ground-floor gallery in a former taxi garage, you could have bought a hallucinogenic fractured-mirror sculpture by a British artist, Gary Webb, for $85,000. (You would have had to hurry; the show sold out.)

If you were looking to spend less, you could have paid $12,500 for a sleek oil painting of a red Corvette by Cheryl Kelley at the Lyons Wier Ortt gallery, a small second-floor space across the street. Or $4,500 at the Yossi Milo Gallery for a disturbing photograph by Tierney Gearon of her mentally ill mother, half-naked.

Or if you were really serious, you could have talked to the photo dealer Alan Klotz about buying a vintage print of Dorothea Lange’s “White Angel Bread Line.” At $800,000 — about the price of a nice one-bedroom co-op in the neighborhood — it has not sold yet, but Mr. Klotz is not worried.

Twelve years after the first major commercial gallery, Matthew Marks, ventured into what was then a ghostly neighborhood of truck fumes, oil stains and Soviet-size warehouses, Chelsea seems to show no signs of losing its momentum as a capital of art commerce the likes of which the city, and maybe the world, has never seen.

By one count, made by the Web site chelseaartgalleries.com, there are now 318 galleries in the neighborhood, many more than SoHo had at its peak. Along with the garment district and the diamond district in Midtown, Chelsea has emerged as one of the largest collections of like businesses in the city’s history.

For at least the last few years the attendant questions have come along almost as consistently as new gallery openings. Has Chelsea peaked? How much bigger can it get? When will it SoHo itself and become one big Comme des Garçons store? There are plentiful signs that company is coming. Recent zoning changes are spurring rampant residential development on the avenues, and the first stage of the High Line park, atop the old rail trestle that threads through the area, will be completed by next spring. But most indications are that Chelsea’s art businesses are continuing to grow apace, both in number and in square feet.

As a way of trying to describe such a huge and baggy beast, this reporter decided to lop off a part of it, to isolate one block and all but take up residence there for several months, watching its rites and rituals, talking to its pioneers and newcomers, its ground-floor gods and high-floor hopefuls.

The stretch of 25th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues presented a good subject for study because it is, in many ways, still a block in transition, unlike 24th, which has long been the neighborhood’s gilded heart, with names like Gagosian, Matthew Marks, Gladstone and Luhring Augustine.

At the 10th Avenue end of 25th Street, by contrast, a gritty car-repair garage remains, where mechanics stand outside in the afternoon smoking and sizing up the well-heeled collectors who pass by. Midblock a free soundtrack often issues from the windows of a recording studio that has somehow resisted the pressures to move. But at the other end of the block, on what was once one of Mr. Fuchs’s parking lots, a 20-story glass-and-concrete office building called the Chelsea Arts Tower is almost completed, 75,000 square feet of commercial cooperative space for galleries and arts-related businesses. Its most anticipated resident is the venerable Marlborough Gallery, which is said to have paid more than $8 million for the first two floors, significantly increasing its presence in Chelsea. Read the whole article NYTimes