It’s time to proclaim a new preeminent gallery district in New York. It is finally, actually, all happening in Tribeca. Just this past Wednesday night, at least 70 major blue-chip gallery shows opened in or near the neighborhood—nearly all of them within a few blocks of one another. We’ve come a long way from the days when this area was called the Triangle Below Canal.
In some ways, the gallery world’s migration has been a slow burn. I’ve been tracking galleries opening in Tribeca since at least 2016, when Stefania Bortolami told me she was ditching Chelsea for downtown, and doing so without a twinge of regret.
“I’m pretty happy to be going away from Chelsea. This whole block is going to be torn down to become condos. It’s insane—not only here, but every block,” she told me a decade ago.
And she predicted that, in time, others would join her.
“I know there are some galleries that need to move from Chelsea,” Bortolami said in 2016. “Already, from the moment when I said I was interested in this space, I got a lot of calls.”
They moved in waves, with a major spike happening after the pandemic. In the past few years, though, a larger number of truly global art-selling concerns have claimed a foothold in Tribeca. When Marian Goodman finally gave up its 57th Street location in 2024, it opted to move downtown rather than to the West Side, taking over a gigantic building on Broadway and renovating it top to bottom. In 2022, Pace opened a gallery that would be run solely by its founder, Arne Glimcher. David Zwirner opened a kunsthalle called 52 Walker in 2021; this year, he’s converted the space into a full-blown outpost of his mega-gallery, and next week he will open a show of new paintings by Emma McIntyre. Later this year, Karma, which also has spaces in Chelsea and Los Angeles, will open an outpost on White Street in Tribeca. Other gallery openings, I’m told, are yet to be announced.
The economics of this operation do confuse me. As anyone who shops at Meadow Lane knows, Tribeca is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan, which puts it high on the list for the priciest patch of dirt anywhere. Taylor Swift lives in Tribeca. Crypto-loving billionaire Michael Novogratz lives in Tribeca. So does Mukesh Ambani, the Indian businessman worth $120 billion, who’s turning 11 Hubert Street into the largest apartment in New York City. Indeed, Bortolami told me in 2016 that even back then, she wasn’t getting a price cut by moving out of Chelsea—her Tribeca rent was the same, though the space was bigger.
But remarkably, even as the last half-decade has made city living comically unsustainable—bodegas are selling Diet Cokes for $4—rents in Tribeca have stayed relatively stable. This data point is coming from no lesser authority than Jonathan Travis, the real estate agent who, during the pandemic, brokered deals for one gallerist after another looking for spaces in Tribeca. On the lease-signing side, there’s no one more integral to the whole migration.
