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Far West Chelsea's Gallery District
By Benjamin Sutton, photographs by Daniel Cavazos
Far West Chelsea’s gallery district will soon feature the added attraction of being home to a unique public park serving as a local pedestrian thoroughfare, real estate amenity, international tourist destination and neighborhood-redefining piece of urban design. The High Line Park’s effects will vastly outstrip its practical details: the green re-furbishing of a disused industrial railway strung above the city grid between long-gone factory warehouses. The stylish, industrial-retrofit design will draw new interests and people to an area already known as the contemporary art world’s epicenter.
The elevated park’s impact on the neighborhood is not entirely predictable, especially with its upper sections (North from 30th Street) being bound to the Hudson Yards mega-project and its uncertain future. However, with the first section opening in early 2009 (that stretch, between Gansevoort and 20th Streets, will be followed by Section Two between 20th and 30th Streets, in late 2009), some of the High Line’s effects are already being felt and seen. Residential developments at various stages of completion dot the park’s path, and the project has garnered much attention in art and architecture circles, forming a buzz of international anticipation.
West Chelsea’s gallery district stands to gain immensely from this showpiece of a newer, greener urbanism. Additional exhibition spaces, larger audiences and a richer built environment are already accruing to the area. There are, naturally, risks to increased public and private attention directed towards Chelsea’s western edge. Chief among these concerns is that rising real estate values may make the area unaffordable for smaller, non-profit and niche galleries. As the pace of these changes accelerates, it’s worth pausing to consider how they might play out and what other factors may contribute to how the High Line Park will reshape West Chelsea in coming years.
Something for Everyone
Like the park itself (designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and landscape architects Field Operations), the High Line’s greatest impacts will be public. Many of these feature in the design, like large plazas serving as park access points. The largest square is planned for 18th Street and Tenth Avenue, a space currently occupied by a parking lot. The lot will be converted into a public piazza with a broad staircase providing seating and access to the High Line, and a free-standing T-shaped structure at ground level would house a café with views of the park and neighborhood. The plaza, pending funding, would open after the park’s first phase and offer a pleasant space in a neighborhood still offering too few public parks and squares to its increasing pedestrian traffic.
Another major feature of the High Line design (though its details remain murky) is a gallery being installed on the elevated parkway. Passing through the Chelsea Market building between 15th and 16th Streets along Tenth Avenue, the High Line will become a partially enclosed art space. Behind its wall of paneled glass, this public gallery for contemporary art will firmly connect the High Line project to the surrounding neighborhood. Though it’s still unclear how it will be managed and by whom, that space’s commitment to displaying art proves a fundamental synergy between the High Line project and its setting, particularly as it leads, from that point northward, into the densest stretch of Chelsea’s gallery district.
Already at its Meatpacking District extremity, of course, art figures prominently in the park’s iconography. The biggest project bound to the High Line is the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building, whose Renzo Piano-designed structure anchors the park’s southern tip (the intersection of Gansevoort and Washington Streets). A cascade of massive, tapered forms, Piano’s design provides a magnetic art destination at the High Line’s base, before it leads museum-goers North to Chelsea’s roughly 450 galleries. The museum will feature some 50,000 square feet of space between its inviting glass-walled lobby, sun-filled roof terraces and soaring light well. Blurring boundaries between public and gallery space, Piano’s Whitney building brings the uptown museum’s art world clout to bare on an urban park and the neighborhood it connects.
At the High Line’s other end an infinitely larger project holds ambiguous implications for West Chelsea’s gallery district. The Hudson Yards, a massive public-private undertaking being overseen by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) involves covering the western rail yards with a concrete slab upon which to erect mixed-use buildings. The final Hudson Yards design will include the High Line Park, whose final stretch runs along the perimeter of the six square block project. Dominated as it is by corporate interests, however, the Hudson Yards will likely mark the symbolic northern border of Chelsea’s gallery district.
The Public Good in Private Projects
If impending developments to the North are decidedly more Midtown in spirit and style, new buildings coming to the gallery district are (mostly) of a terrific architectural pedigree. Already the book-shaped Standard Hotel – a floating rectilinear form straddling the High Line near its southern end – is nearing completion. If not exactly modest or clever, the upright pose of the Standard’s glass wall above the elevated park takes flashy architecture to an absurd, self-conscious and spectacular extreme. Just to the North, the office building 450W14 also straddles the park, with a more sober ten-story glass and steel addition rising from its existing brick base. The effect will be more muted and elegant, a stripped version of the converted warehouses housing many of the galleries to the North.
Meanwhile, one of the least interesting High Line-adjacent buildings is already finished: the Caledonia (on Tenth Avenue between 16th and 17th Streets). Unfortunately generic in an area whose built environment demands a greater level of style and artistry, the Caledonia provides a good example of the risks engendered by attractions like the High Line. With space selling quickly thanks to the park’s instant name-recognition, developers and architects can comfortably ride the coattails of the neighboring post-industrial park’s sleek design.
Fortunately, most other buildings rising near the High Line will be somewhere between spectacular and subdued. Two of the former will cantilever gently over the elevated parkway, leaning in to give tenants maximum High Line exposure. At 23rd Street, the recently announced HL23 will squeeze from an impossibly narrow footprint between the elevated railway and neighboring High Line 519 building, before extending over the park. 245 Tenth Avenue, a building by architecture firm Della Valle Bernheimer one block to the North, has mushroomed over the park at 24th Street and, when complete, will be a floating oval of patterned metal and glass. These stylish residential buildings are structurally daring, though their luxury condominiums’ protrusions over the High Line raise another potential problem.
Build-up without Pricing Up?
The cost of space in the area will likely keep rising, as most of West Chelsea’s new developments cater to the housing market’s highest end. So far the neighborhood’s increased prices haven’t offset the gallery scene’s expansion. However, with most new buildings devoting little space to galleries (often just ground-floor retail), there may be a shortage of new affordable spaces in the future. If galleries are gradually priced out of West Chelsea, the area may be largely given over to high-end retail and restaurants much like what has happened in the Meatpacking District (where the High Line begins). Though such drastic transformations would take years, conscientious planners, architects and community activists must begin to address them now.
A completed building adjacent to the High Line Park’s second section usefully illustrates what future West Chelsea developments might ideally resemble. 520 West 27th Street, by architecture firm FLAnk, is a sleek postmodern take on the neighborhood’s older, larger warehouses. A mixed-use building housing offices and condos, its ground floor spaces are designed specifically to accommodate art galleries. The conventional form is less spectacular than some nearby developments, but its use of space is more efficient and it will likely age more successfully than glassy structures by architects imitating the day’s popular style. Finally, FLAnk’s design doesn’t try to overwhelm – aesthetically or physically – the nearby High Line.
Regardless of its long-term effects, the park adds an interesting dynamic to a neighborhood whose relative isolation (from public transportation and large residential districts) has helped it keep a steady pace since the explosion of its gallery scene in the mid-nineties. As more people come to West Chelsea for the High Line Park, move into the area’s new luxury developments and more empty or stagnant lots get built up (at present, new construction sites spring to action every few weeks), it will be fascinating to see how the neighborhood’s character adapts and endures.
What’s fairly certain, however, is that the balance of changes engendered by the high-profile public park will be positive. By attracting many new visitors, the High Line Park and Whitney Museum will expose greater crowds to the area’s incomparably rich array of galleries. Congruently, West Chelsea’s increasingly rich and varied built landscape is becoming one of the most dense, unique and inventive in the world, an architectural standard to match the area’s vanguard role in the art community. Contingent rises in local real estate prices will likely have only minor impacts on the gallery district’s enduring role as the world’s most vital contemporary art destination.
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