When was it exactly?
It depends who you ask. For Salon 94’s Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, it was 2007, the first time she walked up Freeman Alley, on her way to dinner with Marilyn Minter. For the Museum of Modern Art P.S. 1’s Klaus Biesenbach, it was about 2004, when he stumbled into Reena Spaulings’s gallery on Grand Street and wondered where he was. For Bureau’s Gabrielle Giattino, it was back in 2001, after Michele Maccarone opened her space with a full-building installation by Christoph Büchel. Angela Westwater can trump them all: The longtime co-owner of Sperone Westwater remembers feeling that Manhattan’s Lower East Side had shifted into some new, major gear when she went to visit Roy Lichtenstein at his studio on the Bowery in 1970.
Whenever it sprouted, there is no doubt that the Lower East Side art scene is now in full bloom. Once characterized by scrubby art projects and meta-galleries that felt as if they had moved into the area’s cramped, low-ceilinged storefronts under the auspices of the Homestead Act, today the neighborhood proves that Chelsea has not cornered the market on Benjamin Moore Decorators White—or on name-brand architects. Sprinkled throughout the 10002 zip code but increasingly organized around Bowery at Rivington and Orchard at Hester, more than 60 galleries fuel the L.E.S. scene, many of them opened within the past three years.
The area received an important injection of credibility when Chelsea’s Lehmann Maupin gallery, which represents big-name artists like Tracey Emin and Gilbert and George, opened a second location there in 2007. “Opening here was an opportunity to appeal to a more cutting-edge, younger crowd,” says Rachel Lehmann, a partner in the gallery. “Now, we see the critics coming down here on Sunday.” That same year, the Bowery Hotel colonized what had once been considered Skid Row. And, just as Chelsea had Dia’s flagship luring the art world to the neighborhood back in the Nineties, the Bowery got its own cultural heavyweight, when the New Museum moved into its new seven-story home, designed by the Japanese firm SANAA. This, plus the Cooper Union’s Thom Mayne–designed academic building at the Bowery’s north end, and the new Norman Foster–designed Sperone Westwater gallery, explains why architecture wags have taken to calling this once destitute stretch of pavement “Pritzker Place.” Greenberg Rohatyn is opening her biggest Salon 94 space there in September, and earlier this year the street received Keith McNally’s blessing with his pizza restaurant, Pulino’s.
As the Bowery gets glammed up, the south end of Orchard Street is trying to stay true to its anarchic roots, but gentrification is also happening there. Most significant, the cerebral heyday of the gallery as theoretical art project seems to be pretty much on its last legs. The fabled Orchard—the experimental, experiential art-space-thingy, run for three years by 12 partners who probed the links between art, commerce, and politics with sharp-edged group shows—is gone. Spaulings’s It-spot mantle has been spirited away by On Stellar Rays, which this year managed to get four artists into “Greater New York,” at P.S. 1. The free-floating endeavor called Dispatch—whose directors would find spaces, then create and curate shows—has become the stolid-sounding Bureau, a real gallery with a street-level space, an artist roster, and a schedule. And the cool but confusing Rental gallery has been renamed Untitled and moved from its weird East Broadway location to a big space nearby.
