There is a pathetic story of a man from Connecticut who, a few years ago, took his Porsche to be repaired in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, only to find that an art gallery—and a big one, too—had usurped the space where his garage had been. What’s more, in the very spot where the jack-lift had raised his car for servicing, there stood a hefty installation by Tony Smith. The man was out of the loop. He hadn’t realized that his Chelsea, a place of garages, repair shops for upscale autos, taxi gaseterias, tire fixers, and huge warehouses, was morphing into an art arena where modishly dressed art dealers, doers, and buyers rubbed elbows with grungy mechanics groping the innards of cars and trucks.
For about a decade now, Chelsea, located on the far West Side of Manhattan, stretching roughly from 13th to 30th Streets between Ninth Avenue and the West Side Highway, has been the “new” art district, a giant salesroom for contemporary work (as in SoHo, there are no purveyors of Old Masters there). And if the larger of the new galleries somewhat resemble auto showrooms, well, you can’t say they don’t reflect the neighborhood.
Chelsea is the latest in a long run of Manhattan art districts—districts that have included 57th Street and the upper Madison Avenue area, the short-lived East Village phenomenon of the early 1980s, and the loft-and-small-factory precincts of SoHo that now make up a high-rent shopping mall. Unlike SoHo, which grew
