Before there was a district there was a floor of one office building

The floor of one office building where the American art market was invented — Parsons, Janis, Pierre Matisse, Pace and the Fuller Building years.

• The Ninth Floor Where It BeganBetty Parsons Gallery at 15 East 57th Street and how one dealer's willingness to show Pollock, Rothko and Newman before the market existed for them defined what a New York gallery could be.
• What Sidney Janis Brought OverHow Janis used his position at 15 West 57th to broker the reputations of Mondrian, Léger and de Kooning in the same rooms, and why his 1962 New Realists show split the Abstract Expressionists who had trusted him.
• Henri's Son, Dealing on 57thPierre Matisse Gallery at 41 East 57th Street — the dealer who brought Miró, Giacometti and Balthus to New York — and how the gallery's position inside the Fuller Building shaped its identity as the most European address in the American trade.
• The Fuller Building and What Pace Did With ItThe 1929 Fuller Building at 595 Madison and its long tenure as Manhattan's de facto gallery tower — from Knoedler onward — culminating in Arne Glimcher's Pace Gallery making the address its own before the move to 510 West 25th.
• Marian Goodman and the Last Great 57th Street GalleryHow Goodman opened at 24 West 57th in 1977 and built a transatlantic programme — Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski, John Baldessari — at a moment when the trade was already looking south toward SoHo.