Galleries · Geography
Why Galleries Cluster in the Same Three Streets
Chelsea, the Marais, Auguststrasse, Cork Street: gallery districts form for reasons that have almost nothing to do with art and everything to do with rent, foot traffic and the walking habits of people with money.
In every city with an art market there is a street, or a cluster of three, where the galleries are. Visitors assume it was always so. It was not. Gallery districts are born, move and die on a cycle of twenty to thirty years, and the same forces drive them everywhere: cheap space, a first mover, collectors who like to walk, and then, inevitably, the rent.
The cycle
It begins with space. A district of light industry loses its tenants, the buildings are large and cheap and have high ceilings, and a gallerist with more ambition than money takes a floor. The first one attracts a second, because collectors will make a trip for two galleries and not for one. At five, the district has a name. At twenty, there is a bar, a bookshop and a gallery weekend. At forty, the landlords have noticed, the fashion brands arrive, and the gallerist who started it is looking at a former garage two kilometres away.
Chelsea in New York followed this arc from the mid 1990s, when galleries left SoHo, which had followed it in the 1970s when galleries left 57th Street. The Marais in Paris, the Löwenbräu site in Zurich, Auguststrasse in Berlin, the arches under the railway in London: the same story with different accents.
Why walking matters
The decisive factor is the collector's Saturday. Serious buyers visit galleries the way other people visit markets, on foot, in an afternoon, six or eight at a time. A gallery alone in a suburb gets the visitors who came for it; a gallery in a district gets the visitors who came for its neighbour. The value of a location is the number of other galleries within ten minutes on foot, which is why districts are dense and why a gallery that moves out alone often loses a third of its footfall in the first year.
Nobody drives to one gallery. Everybody walks to eight.
A gallerist who moved twice in Berlin
The three-street rule
Districts are rarely larger than three or four streets, and the reason is the same walk. Beyond about a kilometre, the afternoon runs out. So districts intensify rather than spread: galleries take second floors, back courtyards and basements before they take the next street over. When a district finally jumps, it jumps a long way, to the next patch of cheap space, and the cycle restarts.
Reading a city by its districts
Most cities now have two or three districts at different stages. The old one, with the established galleries, the higher prices and the fashion boutique on the corner. The current one, with the mid-career programmes and the gallery weekend. And the new one, half found, with three galleries in a former printworks and a great deal of walking between them. The Atlas on this site names them for twelve cities. The rule for a visit is to start in the new district in the morning, when the energy is, and finish in the old one, where the benches are.
The exceptions
Two kinds of gallery escape the cycle. The very large, which build destinations and can afford to be visited on purpose, and the domestic, which show in apartments and rely on appointments rather than passing trade. Everyone else lives on the walk, and the walk is why the Atlas is organised by streets rather than by names. Names change. The habit of walking from one door to the next on a Saturday afternoon has not changed since the first dealer opened a second room in Paris a century and a half ago.
