Chelsea took the garages because nothing else would fit

Matthew Marks on West 22nd Street in 1994, then the garages filling one by one — Gagosian, Zwirner, Pace, Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Hauser and Wirth — and the High Line changing the street.

• The First Garage on West 22ndMatthew Marks signing the lease at 523 West 24th Street (and then 522 West 22nd) in 1994 and why the decision to move into a former garage — rather than adapt a loft or stay uptown — established the spatial grammar Chelsea galleries would repeat for the next twenty years.
• Larry Gagosian Takes the Whole BlockGagosian's expansion from 980 Madison Avenue into 555 West 24th Street and then a run of Chelsea addresses — a walk-through of the square footage, the building choices and the programme decisions that turned one dealer into a network.
• From Prince Street to West 21stPaula Cooper Gallery's 1996 move from SoHo to 534 West 21st Street — a comparison of the two buildings, what the move cost in terms of the SoHo neighbourhood's character, and what Cooper gained in ceiling height and floor plate.
• David Zwirner and the Gallery as CampusHow Zwirner's expansion from 43 Greene Street in SoHo to a cluster of buildings on West 19th and West 20th Streets produced what is effectively a multi-building campus — and how that scale changed the programming logic of a single-dealer gallery.
• Gladstone on 21st StreetBarbara Gladstone's move into West Chelsea and the 515 West 24th and 530 West 21st spaces — a dealer who had shown Matthew Barney since the late 1980s taking industrial room.
• Hauser & Wirth Takes the RoxyThe Swiss gallery's arrival in New York and its 18th Street building — a former Roxy nightclub turned into one of the largest commercial exhibition spaces in the city.
• What the High Line Did to the RentThe High Line's opening in 2009 and its measurable effect on the gallery blocks immediately below — rising ground-floor rents on West 25th through West 29th, the departure of mid-size galleries and the consolidation that followed.
• The Starrett-Lehigh BuildingCory & Cory's 1931 freight terminal on Twelfth Avenue, its ribbon windows and truck elevators, and how a warehouse for railcars became the address galleries and studios wanted.