Published: November 3, 2006, The New York Times
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.
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