Tribeca was not supposed to become a gallery neighborhood. Its identity had been established as residential — the cast-iron lofts that attracted artists in the 1970s had, by the 1990s, been converted into some of the most expensive apartments in the city, their original occupants priced out and largely absent. The neighborhood's commercial ground floors filled with restaurants and the service businesses that support dense, affluent residential populations.
What happened instead was gradual. A few galleries followed the artists who had made Tribeca their address — not the working artists of the 1970s but the established figures whose market positions allowed them to afford the neighborhood. Then the galleries that represented those artists began to look at the area seriously. Then the galleries that wanted to be near those galleries followed.
The result, visible now along Walker Street and the blocks adjacent to it, is a cluster of serious galleries that does not yet have the critical mass of Chelsea or the Lower East Side but has something those neighborhoods lack: quietness. Exhibitions in Tribeca are not competing with fifteen other openings happening simultaneously on the same block. The audience that comes tends to be intentional about the visit.
Andrew Kreps, Bortolami, GRIMM, Cristin Tierney, Ortuzar Projects, and Charles Moffett are among the galleries that have established themselves in the neighborhood over the past several years. Each has a distinct program, but they share a certain seriousness about how work is presented that distinguishes them from more commercially oriented spaces.
Whether Tribeca develops into a genuine gallery district depends on whether rents permit it to. Walker Street and its environs are still affordable relative to Chelsea's prime blocks — but that gap narrows as the neighborhood's reputation grows.