Morning in Chelsea

NEW YORK — Here in the capital of the American art world, galleries have always rubbed shoulders with other businesses. On and off Madison Avenue, showcases for fine art are interspersed with designer boutiques. Galleries on 57th Street and 5th Avenue compete with upscale department stores and Planet Hollywood.

In SoHo, where art displaced industry in the 1970s and dominated the neighborhood in the early ‘80s, galleries have become part of an increasingly dense mix of apparel and home furnishings shops, watering holes and eateries. A boutique for high-end Italian designers Dolce & Gabbana is scheduled to open this fall on West Broadway, in the same block as the venerable Leo Castelli and Sonnabend galleries.

The scene in Chelsea--Manhattan’s newest gallery enclave--is quite different. Bordered by 18th and 27th streets, between 10th and 11th avenues, this district offers few attractions for shoppers and diners.

A ramshackle outlet for Williams-Sonoma cooking gear and several house and garden suppliers is doing a booming business on 10th Avenue. Next door is Zucca, a classy Mediterranean bistro favored by the cognoscenti. But the rest of the neighborhood is home to a plastics manufacturer, a mass mailings company and a glut of transport-related businesses: One-Stop Auto Center, Adolph’s Trucking Co., a gas station, a car wash and a taxi repair yard.

“I think this is the world capital of car deodorant,” said dealer Helene Winer, who moved her gallery, Metro Pictures, to Chelsea after 16 years in SoHo. She and her partner, Janelle Reiring, share a building on West 24th with Barbara Gladstone, who also left SoHo, and Matthew Marks, who also operates another gallery in Chelsea and one on Madison Avenue.

In a cooperative venture, they bought the building together and turned a former cutlery factory and garage into a handsome showcase for contemporary art. Dubbed the MGM building--for Marks, Gladstone and Metro--the two-story brick structure symbolizes the growing solidity of the Chelsea gallery scene. The galleries seem to be here to stay, at least until the next hot spot appears or art gets squeezed out by commerce.

“People ask how long it will be before Chelsea is like SoHo,” Marks said. “I used to say, ‘I hope we have 10 years,’ but now I say, ‘Let’s be realistic’ and give it five years.”

Indeed, the rush to Chelsea is astonishing, especially for occasional visitors to New York. As recently as three years ago, the only reason for the art crowd to go to Chelsea was to visit the Dia Center for the Arts, a prominent nonprofit showcase that opened in 1987 and launched a critically acclaimed program of large-scale solo exhibitions of contemporary artists’ work. In October 1994, when Marks opened his space on West 22nd in the same block as Dia, his was the only gallery in Chelsea.

In sharp contrast, the current issue of New York’s “Art Now Gallery Guide” lists 35 galleries and two nonprofit organizations in Chelsea. Among the newcomers are several SoHo veterans, including Pamela Auchincloss, who is doing business on the 12th floor of a huge building on West 26th, and Max Protetch, who has opened a ground-floor space on West 22nd.

Still, many dealers believe that a rerun of SoHo’s commercial boom is unlikely. Chelsea will become much more of “an art ghetto,” said Paula Cooper, who established SoHo’s first gallery in 1968 and opened her space on West 21st in 1996. The section of West Chelsea inhabited by galleries is confined by a residential district east of 10th Street and by the Hudson River on the west, so expansion can go only north and south, she said. Chelsea’s large industrial spaces are also less inviting to the small shopkeepers who have stuffed themselves into every square inch of SoHo.

For the moment, Chelsea seems to be in a state of transition. Feigen Contemporary, owned by longtime New York dealer Richard Feigen and directed by Lance Kinz and Susan Reynolds, is expected to open on West 20th in September. Signs posted on a nearby building announce the imminent arrival of half a dozen other galleries, but the general ambience is quiet by New York standards.

“You still can’t get a good cup of coffee here,” Marks said.

Compared to those in SoHo, distances between some of the galleries are long, and people don’t just drop in. “There are no chic people wandering around here,” Winer said. “It’s a bit of a shock when you step outside and realize there is nowhere to go but another gallery,” she said, noting that she can’t pop out for a bite to eat or to buy a birthday gift as she did in SoHo.

But the dealers aren’t complaining. Many of them have moved to Chelsea to get away from alien commerce and avoid prohibitive costs of more desirable areas. “SoHo did us in,” Winer said. “It got overrun with things that have nothing to do with art galleries.”

Another motivator is the space in Chelsea. In contrast to Madison Avenue’s domestic rooms, 57th Street’s high-rises and the SoHo galleries’ cast-iron facades, wood floors and columns, Chelsea’s industrial area offers vast open spaces in plain, solid buildings with concrete floors.

Then there’s the issue of natural light, an element that Southern Californians take for granted but that New Yorkers treasure as a rare and precious commodity--and that Chelsea dealers can’t stop talking about.

“The streets are much wider here. We’re right by the river, and there are no tall buildings that cast long shadows,” Marks said. “It’s very different physically [from other gallery districts]. That makes the art look different.”

Taking advantage of the situation, the most prominent Chelsea galleries have skylights and glass fronts that allow parts of their exhibitions to be seen from the street. “The light is wonderful,” said Cooper, who recently installed “Moondog,” a huge geometric sculpture by Tony Smith, in her central 45-foot-square space, where the walls rise to 17 feet and the skylight peaks at 27 feet.

Marks is credited with starting the Chelsea gallery scene, but he claims he was only looking for a wonderful place to show large contemporary artworks.

“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “Before I opened my first gallery, I thought, ‘OK, young art dealer wants large space. Go to SoHo.’ I spent about six months looking in the first half of 1990. There were tons of things available, but I couldn’t find something I loved.

“Then my real estate agent told me about a beautiful gallery uptown, and I walked in and felt very comfortable. So I opened on Madison Avenue in 1990, in a small building that had had galleries in it since the ‘40s or ‘50s. I started by showing small works on paper, fairly traditional things. After a while I wanted to show larger-scale contemporary art, so I needed a bigger space.

“I was ready to go to SoHo, but it was 1993. Guess what? Nothing was available. All the spaces I had looked at three years earlier had become stores. By then I had very definite ideas about what I wanted, but large ground-floor spaces were not available.

“Then I went to a Christmas party at Charlie Wright’s, who was the director of Dia, and I asked if he knew of anything around Dia. He said, ‘Yes, there’s an incredible space. If we needed more space, we’d take it in a second.’ ”

Marks pursued Wright’s tip the next day and decided the building was perfect, but he was concerned about the location. People visited Dia, but would they come to his gallery in Chelsea? He decided to take a chance and beat a competitor who wanted to use the building for ambulance storage. After a long, frustrating period of renovation, he opened in October 1994 with a show of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings.

“We had 1,000 people. That’s the last time I worried if people would come,” Marks said. “At least three times as many people come to the gallery on 22nd and here on 24th as ever came uptown. Going to art galleries is a popular sport in New York. People really love it, and they really come.”

Within a few months, he had new neighbors. Downtown dealers Paul Morris and Tom Healy opened a gallery in January 1995, sharing a building with Pat Hearn, a veteran of SoHo and the East Village.

Later that year Annina Nosei, known for discovering David Salle, Barbara Kruger and Jean-Michel Basquiat, opened an upstairs gallery on West 22nd.

Cooper, who lives in Chelsea and was ready for a change after more than 25 years in Soho, purchased a brick building on West 21st. She hired Dia architect Richard Gluckman to renovate it and opened in October 1996 with a show of Carl Andre’s sculpture.

Meanwhile, Barbara Gladstone had called Marks, who wanted more space, to see if he was interested in buying a building with her. The first property they looked at was unsuitable, but Gladstone soon found the building on West 24th. “It was just like the other one, on 22nd Street,” Marks said. “I walked in and looked across the wide open space. It was a complete mess, with tons of garbage. I said, ‘Great, let’s do it.’ ”

The building was big enough to be divided into three two-story spaces, so Winer and Reiring joined them. They hoped to open all three galleries last fall, but construction took much longer than expected. Finally, in desperation, they made a preliminary debut Nov. 17.

“It was like a stage set,” Marks said. “The galleries were finished enough and we had electricity but no water. Metro didn’t have a staircase; Barbara’s staircase had been installed for 24 hours. We threw a great big party. Barbara and I kept our shows on till Christmas, but Metro couldn’t. We closed from Christmas to the end of January and reopened about Feb. 1.

Four months later, they are still tinkering with lighting and getting used to their new environment.

“I like the beginnings of things,” Winer said.

So does Cooper. “It’s always interesting to see the city revitalize itself,” she said. “I remember when SoHo was a place of desolation, filled with sweat shops. I went there because I had no choice. I had not a penny.”

SoHo will survive as a gallery scene, the dealers say. So, apparently, will Chelsea. But with rising rents and real estate prices, it probably will not go unchallenged. “If I were younger, I’d have my eye on the meat market,” Cooper said, referring to a district south of West 14th where the streets run diagonally, in contrast to Manhattan’s dominant grid.

Ever restless, New York’s gallery scene is on the move.