Tribeca Is New York’s New Gallery Mecca

“Rents on the big ground-floor spaces have not really moved drastically at all since 2020,” Travis tells me, though he mentioned that the inventory of “high-quality large spaces” has been low since day one.

Now all of those spaces have been snapped up by dealers ready for the spotlight, hell-bent on competing in what’s now the most concentrated art-viewing hopscotch in Manhattan. And the energy gets pretty bonkers with 70 openings raging at the same time.

“Tribeca as a neighborhood is absolutely a global arts powerhouse now, with foot traffic that rivals anywhere in the world when the galleries have coordinated openings,” Travis says. “I’ve even seen lines to get into galleries.”

As of this month, the neighborhood even has a local artists canteen. Not The Odeon—though The Odeon is still a perfect restaurant and just a convenient stroll away from the Tribeca gallery network.

That restaurant is Faux, a neo-bistro that opened a few days ago on Church Street—just steps away from many galleries on White Street.

Among media and dining-out types, Faux’s not an unknown entity. It’s the work of 23-year-old former Balthazar staffer George McNally, son of Keith McNally, the I Regret Almost Everything author who kicked off his Gotham-conquering run by opening, you guessed it, The Odeon, back in 1980, along with his brother Brian McNally and his then wife Lynn Wagenknecht, who still owns it solo. Faux channels the vibe of another McNally property: Lucky Strike, a place I loved that doubled as SoHo’s art world anchor restaurant before all the galleries moved to Chelsea.

“Eric Fischl went there for lunch with Ralph Gibson. They had a standing thing,” gallerist Jeffrey Deitch told me while mourning Lucky Strike after it closed in 2020. “I used to go there to have a few beers in the evenings with Jeff Koons. It was kind of a ritual.”

George McNally’s restaurant isn’t a carbon copy of Keith’s. It’s got funky paintings-on-tile of tarot cards, tables without white tablecloths, and paperback-size menus. The food, though, is perfect. Particularly the steak frites.

McNally didn’t exactly plan to open Faux in this new gallery district. But as he told me Tuesday, its location is pretty fortuitous. He’s already in talks to host private post-opening celebration dinners at Faux’s downstairs bar, which doubles as a vaulted private dining room. Not that you need a buyout: Among those seated at the two dozen tables Tuesday night were the painters Adam Alessi, Tristan Unrau, and Dustin Hodges, along with dealers Sebastian Gladstone and George Newall and the esteemed ventriloquist Sophie Becker.

When McNally was sitting at our perfectly rickety table, I said that the place looked like it had been here forever. He almost blushed. “That’s the highest compliment anyone could give me,” he said.

On Wednesday I made a quick trip to SoHo, where Rita Ackermann was opening a show at the Hauser & Wirth space on Wooster Street—just a block from what was once Andrea Rosen’s gallery in the ’90s. During a brief, rare tour of the new show before doors opened to the public, Ackermann said she had her first New York solo show with Rosen in 1994. Several of the people there for the tour had also been present way back when—like Chloë Sevigny, who told me she met Ackermann when she was 18 and used to walk into Rosen’s gallery three times a day.

Then I headed toward Tribeca—and past the Celine store, which was giving out hot dogs with “Celine” written on them in mustard. I also passed dealer Garth Greenan’s new two-prong SoHo foothold, a pair of elegant ground-floor spaces on Greene Street. The gallery is showing work by the legendary Rosalyn Drexler, a bodybuilder, wrestler, novelist, playwright, and film critic for Vogue, who died last year at the age of 98.

And then I crossed the Rubicon of Canal Street into Tribeca, where art viewers thronged down Broadway and peeled off toward galleries in every direction.

I was blown away by everything happening at Maxwell Graham, which just moved to the top floor of the building adjacent to Cortlandt Alley—one of the most sui generis edifices downtown, with a hand-cranked elevator and all sorts of secret entrances and exits. Graham’s new space is generously proportioned, and the inaugural show features Michael E. Smith, the enigmatic poet-artist who sculpts with light and makes balletic, strange ready-mades from everyday objects. Smith is having a banner year, with a solo show at Graham and a survey at MASS MoCA, plus an exhibition at Waldo, Tobias Czudej’s seasonal space in an out-there part of Maine. On Wednesday the place was packed—who needs painting when there’s capital-C conceptual art?

Down the street was Ellie Rines Gallery, formerly known as 56 Henry, which just moved to Tribeca and debuted with a massive installation by Christopher K. Ho. The new ground-floor space is, by my eyeball estimate, about 10 times the size of the old gallery—but just as before, you’re bound to run into some unexpected art people if you sneak into the back room. I walked in to see a giant Cynthia Talmadge on the wall, with Cecily Brown sitting in front of it and 291 Agency cofounder Andrea Crane talking to artist Jo Messer. Nearby, I enjoyed Matt McCormick’s paintings installed inside the façade of a SoCal corner store at Ruttkowski;68. At Chapter NY I loved new work by Alix Vernet. She’s made sculptures from the aluminum condenser coils inside discarded AC units, the guts of the cooling machines that have been weathered by New York City elements. As the press release puts it, they’re “more photographs than ready-mades,” as they process passing time by accumulating dust particles.

But of course, there were painting shows to see as well. Herman Cherry, the late Abstract Expressionist painter who was brought into The Club in the 1950s by Philip Guston, has works looking fresh as ever at Sebastian Gladstone. I was very intrigued by Mia Goldstein’s paintings—paintings of paintings, really, on view at The Journal Gallery. Claire Oswalt had an opening at Broadway Gallery. Alexander Gray had an expansive survey of Melvin Edwards, who died earlier this year.

I was most delighted by the Carroll Dunham show at Matthew Brown, a suite of new paintings where Dunham fully bets on himself—making some of his most out-there but oddly endearing work. Word is that several have been snapped up by big institutions, as they should be.

It still felt strange to see such a show in Tribeca rather than Chelsea, where so many canonical painting exhibitions have been staged in the last 30 years. In the back of the gallery, where a bunch of absolutely insane Dunham works on paper hung salon-style on the walls, Brown conceded that a show of such scale and historical oomph could have fit at a Chelsea gallery—but it’s also inspiring to him that this neighborhood is ready for a big Carroll Dunham show.

Brown also hosted a dinner for Dunham at Il Buco Alimentari, Donna Leonard’s offshoot of the beloved Bond Street Il Buco. An entire generation of artists circulated through the restaurant’s two stories: Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson, Huma Bhabha, Joe Bradley and Valentina Akerman, Mel Kendrick, Louise Lawler, Alexis Rockman, Amy Sillman. Of course, the artist Laurie Simmons, Dunham’s wife, was there, along with their children, Lena and Cyrus. Jerry Saltz went looking for pizza and found it, while Roberta Smith sat at a table with former New Museum director Lisa Phillips. Later, Phillips told me about the show she curated at her old stomping grounds on the Bowery—a show about the Bowery. Along with the legends was a new generation of artists, including Unrau, Alessi, Ohad Meromi, and a number of artists from Brown’s stable: Uri Aran, Olivia van Kuiken, Blair Whiteford.

Dinner ended, but no one really said goodbye. Despite the Tribeca takeover, everyone was planning to storm Chelsea for another set of openings on Thursday.