Condo Construction Dooms Chelsea Art Gallery

We’ve given co-op and condo boards plenty of advice on negotiating access agreements when a new building goes up next door. It turns out other types of buildings can suffer from neighboring construction, too. Even art galleries.

Mike Weiss has closed his eponymous Chelsea gallery, citing damage to his building by crews erecting a luxury condo next door, The FitzRoy, a 10-story, 14-unit building that’s being developed by JDS Development Group and Largo NYC. Apartments are priced from $5.2 to $16.5 million.

Weiss tells ARTnews that the demolition of the previous building damaged the gallery’s wall and artworks, and that he, his employees and his artists have been verbally assaulted by the FitzRoy’s construction workers.

“We survived three hurricanes, a drop in the economy, but we can’t seem to survive this,” says Weiss, who called 311 80 times and filed a lawsuit against the contractor. “Just walking around in Chelsea, I don’t enjoy it anymore. There’s so much construction and noise. If you can’t get walk-in traffic, why be in Chelsea?” Weiss adds that he considers the situation “unresolvable.”