Magnetic City by Justin Davidson

Author:Justin Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Depression that battered the wealthiest neighborhoods pushed marginal ones into utter bleakness, and the largely industrial stretch of Chelsea between Sixth Avenue and the waterfront was among the deadest and most silent in Manhattan, especially after the sweatshops and small factories turned out the lights each evening. The few desperate souls who moved, illegally, into the unheated cold-water lofts were those who had no money and little choice: artists, for example. Willem de Kooning moved into 156 West Twenty-second Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, in 1936. Rudy Burckhardt, a Swiss photographer with some family money and an omnivorous curiosity, and his partner, the dance critic Edwin Denby, joined him. In his photographs, Burckhardt captured the flinty glamour of the bohemian life in Depression-era New York. Here is de Kooning, handsome in an open-necked white shirt, standing in a corner of his sparsely furnished loft. And there’s Denby, in tweed jacket, tie, and polished shoes, his forelock curling over his temple, sitting on the roof of their building. His sharply creased appearance contrasts with the street scene far below, a quasi-cubist gray jumble of fire escapes, stoops, trucks, and graceless buildings blurring into the smog.

For the rest of the twentieth century, Chelsea retained its air of windswept grayness, an inhospitable-looking frontier that became a gay haven and, eventually, a gallery district. If you ask new residents why they want to live in a neighborhood that lacks convenient subway service, grocery stores, and dry cleaners, they’ll usually mumble something about wanting to be close to the art world. What they mean is the world of galleries and collectors, which doesn’t necessarily include artists—or, rather, it trails them like a bioluminescent wake of money. When the dealer Matthew Marks opened a gallery on West Twenty-second Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the artists were long gone, and his colleagues were hesitant to follow him. The area lacked restaurants, public transportation, and foot traffic. Why would anyone show up to buy?

Within two years, galleries were thick on the ground, and while the place still felt depopulated, dealers decided that they could do without passersby who popped in for a look-around but had no intention of buying. The real clients arrived by limousine; here they’d find plenty of parking.

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