Condos to Supplant Another Chelsea Art Gallery

If you thought there was no more space to shoehorn condominium towers around the High Line, you thought wrong. Properties near the elevated park are twice as valuable as buildings just a few blocks away, and 75 percent more valuable than comparable buildings in tony Tribeca, Soho, Greenwich Village, and Gramercy Park, according to a study by StreetEasy. So developers, naturally, drool over such parcels. The Related Companies is no exception, having won approval from the City Planning Commission to develop two towers that will flank the High Line between 18th and 19th Streets near Tenth Avenue, YIMBY reports.

The western parcel will become home to a 22-story residential building with an unknown number of units, while the eastern parcel will be the site of a 10-story, 63-unit condominium.

For art lovers, the announcement continues an unsettling trend of art galleries getting displaced by blockbuster real estate deals. The Hauser & Wirth gallery, at 511 West 18th Street, sits in a two-story building that will be razed to make way for the 22-story tower. In October, the nearby Mike Weiss Gallery announced it was closing because of damage suffered during demolition next door to make way for a luxury condo tower. To add a little insult to that injury, gallery workers, patrons and artists were verbally assaulted by construction crews erecting the condo tower.

“Just walking around in Chelsea, I don’t enjoy it anymore,” gallery owner Mike Weiss said at the time. “There’s so much construction and noise. If you can’t get walk-in traffic, why be in Chelsea?”