The New Chelsea's Many Faces

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TWILIGHT cloaked the raw-edged precinct west of the old High Line, the abandoned railroad viaduct that haunts lower 10th Avenue. Ghostly signs, ever fading on the brick walls of brooding old lofts, attested to businesses long lost: "Spears Furniture Exchange" and "Kiln-Dried Lumber" and "Tower's Warehouses."

By all rights, West 22d Street should have been empty on the evening of Oct. 28. Instead, there were so many cabs and black sedans that traffic could barely move. The art crowd had descended in a pincers movement from uptown and downtown on the new Matthew Marks Gallery, which opened with a show by Ellsworth Kelly.

Mr. Marks, better known on upper Madison Avenue, has taken over a 5,000-square-foot former truck garage at 522 West 22d Street. In doing so, he is playing a part in the current real-estate renewal of Chelsea, an evolution that wears several faces.

There is an artistic Chelsea. There is a gay Chelsea. There is soon to be -- improbable though it sounds at the moment -- a recreational Chelsea, following the reconstruction of the Chelsea Piers as an enormous sports center.

In artistic Chelsea, the Dia Center for the Arts is planning to convert a six-story, 42,000-square-foot warehouse at 535 West 22d Street into a new museum for its permanent collection. Dia already occupies a four-story building on the same block and owns a one-story building that it leases out.

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"What we've really been doing is acquiring a beachhead," said Ashton Hawkins, chairman of Dia's board. "We're aware that it's going to be improved quite a lot." A half dozen galleries have opened recently on West 22d Street and neighboring blocks.

Gay Chelsea's role has solidified with the arrival of A Different Light bookstore, a cultural cornerstone that had been housed for a decade in an 800-square-foot nook at 548 Hudson Street, near Perry Street. It now takes up more than 5,000 square feet at 151 West 19th Street and its migration seems to embody a northward shift of gay life from Greenwich Village.

Eighth Avenue, meanwhile, has supplanted Christopher Street in some people's minds as the main gay thoroughfare in New York. A map published this summer for gay and lesbian visitors highlighted 17 businesses on the five blocks of the avenue between 16th and 21st Streets. "The epicenter of gay life is at 18th and Eighth," said Pat Rogers, one of the proprietors of Food Bar, just south of 18th Street at 149 Eighth Avenue. This lively spot is the gay-oriented successor to a restaurant called Rogers & Barbero, which Mr. Rogers and Bob Barbero opened in 1983.

DWARFING other developments is the reconstruction of the 1.7 million-square-foot Chelsea Piers, between 17th and 22d Streets. There is to be a golf driving range on Pier 59; a sports club on Pier 60 with three basketball courts, a 42-foot-high rock-climbing wall, running tracks, swimming pool and sun deck; two indoor ice-skating rinks on Pier 61 and a park and two Rollerblade tracks on Pier 62.

Plus, its developers say, there will be a 70,000-square-foot sporting goods store and 25,000-square-foot gymnastics facility in the north end of the vast headhouse that links the piers. This four-block-long structure also accommodates the studios -- 50,000 square feet each -- where the NBC television series "Law and Order" and "The Cosby Mysteries" are filmed, with more than enough room left over for a variety of small offices and a 30,000-square-foot studio that is to be built by Marco Glaviano, a fashion photographer.

The $100 million project is being developed by Chelsea Piers Management, a partnership that has a 20-year lease on the piers from the New York State Transportation Department. The partners said they were putting in about $62 million, half of it their own money and that of a small group of family and friends; the rest has been borrowed, in a financing arranged by Morgan Stanley & Company. The remaining $38 million represents the investment to be made by subtenants. The architects are Butler Rogers Baskett.

"You know what this is?" asked Roland W. Betts, the chairman of Chelsea Piers, as he inspected Pier 60 recently. "This is very high-level recycling."

Opened in 1910, the piers were designed by Warren & Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal. Originally berths for ocean liners, the 825-foot piers were too short to handle the longer vessels of the mid-30's. By the 50's, they were used almost entirely for freighters. New York modernized them in 1963 -- destroying the original Beaux-Arts facade -- but the effort was unavailing. Containerization had already doomed Manhattan as a cargo port.

In retrospect, the city's seemingly fruitless effort to stabilize and strengthen the piers is now paying a dividend. "Structurally, we've inherited something that was built only 30 years ago," said Tom A. Bernstein, president of Chelsea Piers.

The entire complex should be open next October, Mr. Betts said, as he noted with approval how work was progressing on the two center pier sheds (Nos. 60 and 61), where the roofs are being replaced, the steel framework is being cleaned and repainted and the roll-down cargo doors on the upper deck are being replaced by windows.

"PEOPLE who live in Chelsea and know Chelsea are excited about the piers and what's going to happen in the West 20's," said Michael M. Beltrami, an associate broker at Wells & Gay/Stribling, a real-estate firm whose lineage can be traced 175 years, to when Chelsea was the estate of Clement Clarke Moore, author of "A Visit From St. Nicholas." Moore's real-estate adviser was James N. Wells.

Mr. Beltrami said the growing colonization of the far west side by galleries was "as far as you can expand now -- this was the last undesirable pocket."

The Dia Center has been in the area since 1987, when it opened an exhibition hall in a four-story warehouse at 548 West 22d Street that had been renovated to designs by Richard Gluckman. "The sense was at some point that the west edge of Chelsea would spread and that 22d Street would become a corridor," said Michael Govan, the director. "The nice thing about being over here was that it wasn't in the midst of the hustle-bustle of SoHo. Now, it seems, development is coming to us."

In two or three years, Dia plans to begin renovating its newly acquired building at No. 535, Mr. Hawkins said. The architect is once again to be Mr. Gluckman. In three years, Dia will also get back a one-story building at 545 West 22d Street that it is leasing to the Arnulf Rainer Museum.

"The art center is going to move here," Mr. Kelly said, as he walked through the Marks gallery on the day before its opening, supervising the installation of his large paintings, geometric forms in primary colors against stark white walls. "SoHo has become overloaded. Art always moves on."

Mr. Kelly gazed through the broad expanses of glass where the garage doors used to be, over to the loading docks of an abandoned warehouse across the street. "I like all the funkiness," he said of the scene he beheld, adding almost wistfully, "It won't stay that way for long."

Around the corner, from the gallery, at 193 10th Avenue, is the Guardian Angel School, whose student body reflects another significant change. The enrollment has grown to 262 children from 172 a decade ago, said the principal, Maureen P. McElduff. And the school has added a kindergarten and pre-kindergaten.

Once attended by the children of longshoremen and truckers, Guardian Angel now has a much more varied parent body. "A lot of our parents are from the professional area," Ms. McElduff said. "We have an increase each year of business people coming in with their children."

Ms. McElduff, an alumna, remembers that in her childhood her family considered West 22d Street so unsafe that she was not allowed to ride through it on her bicycle.

"Twenty-second Street was a horrible block when I moved here," said Javier Garmendia, who has lived since 1971 on West 20th Street with his partner, Richard Foster. "My mother was terrified when I decided to buy this house because the neighborhood was rather rough."

BECAUSE of Chelsea's reputation, Mr. Garmendia said, single women were not likely to move in. But single men did. "The whole neighborhood became gay during the 70's," he said. He once rented floor-through apartments for as little as $240 a month; they now command $2,900.

Richard Laermer, a writer, moved to West 17th Street in 1980. "Cheap rents are what brought people here," he said. "Chelsea became the obvious next step because it was connected to the Village, it wasn't far from where people worked and, at that point in the 1980's, nobody wanted to live in TriBeCa -- there was only one restaurant."

In his book, "The Gay and Lesbian Handbook to New York City" (Plume, 1994), Mr. Laermer placed Chelsea at the top of the list of gay neighborhoods.

Reliable statistics on the homosexual population are difficult to obtain. But one measure of Chelsea's prominence may be gleaned from a nationwide list maintained by Strubco Inc., a marketing and publishing firm that specializes in reaching gay and lesbian costumers and contributors, as well as those who associate themselves with gay and lesbian causes.

More than 4,000 names on Strubco's list are in the blocks covered by the 10011 ZIP code, which embraces Chelsea and parts of Greenwich Village. That is the highest number in any ZIP code in New York City. Only the West Village (10014) comes close. The East Village (10003) and Upper West Side (10023, 10024, 10025) trail somewhat behind.

A similar pattern can be discerned in the mailing list of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. More than 2,800 of the people on its list are found in the 10011 ZIP code, the highest in the city. No doubt that is due in part to the fact that the center itself is in 10011, at 208 West 13th Street.

"What's interesting is the degree of concentration," said Sean O. Strub, chief executive of Strubco. "We move into the ghetto." A gay man or lesbian might start life in a small town, he said, come out of the closet at college, get a job in a midsized city, move to a city with a large homosexual community, then settle down with a partner in a neighborhood with the highest gay and lesbian concentration -- like Chelsea.

Mr. Strub's associate, Dan Baker, has just taken that last step, moving to West 19th Street with his partner, Robert Miller. The reason was simple, he said. "We both had small, one-bedrooms," Mr. Baker said. "We needed more space and we found it in Chelsea. He mentioned Plainfield, but I resisted."

"Like everybody else," Mr. Baker said, "I'd eaten at restaurants along the strip on Eighth Avenue, but it wasn't until two weeks after we moved that I realized how gay Chelsea is."

Mr. Rogers, who has done business on Eighth Avenue for 11 years, said one turning point occurred this summer, when the international Gay Games were held in New York. "The Gay Games were a huge boost to us and the whole strip along Eighth Avenue," he said. "Everybody benefited dramatically, to the point where we almost could not handle it. It was staggering."

The implication for commercial real estate is obvious. "Many businesses are now proud of pitching to the gay community," Mr. Rogers said. "Eighth Avenue had a lot of grunge shops but now you see people pouring more money into their storefronts."

"There's not a vacant store on Eighth Avenue," said Mr. Beltrami, the broker.

That isn't quite true. But it might as well have been when Different Light went looking for new space. "There was only one location on Eighth that we could have afforded," said Walter Vatter, the bookstore's marketing director. "But that was only 1,600 square feet and we would have outgrown it in 18 months or two years."

Instead, the store settled on a side street, somewhat off the beaten path. "As many customers as we lost by leaving the Village, we've gained by being in Chelsea," said Roz Parr, the manager.

She also cautioned against reading too much symbolism into the move. "We didn't move to Chelsea because we'd had it with the Village," she said. "We desperately needed more space but there are not large spaces available in the Village, even if we could afford them."

Different Light has seen its inventory grow to 17,000 titles from 4,000, Mr. Vatter said. It has an office for its mail-order business, a 75-seat room for readings and is planning to add an espresso bar.

MOST businesses would be pleased to expand. That cannot be said of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a private AIDS service agency that just keeps outgrowing the space it occupies in Chelsea.

"We would like not to be a tenant in Chelsea," said Jeff Richardson, the executive director. "We would all like to be here when we are putting up the 'Closed for Business' signs on all of our buildings. We couldn't think of a happier day."

Only 12 years ago, at the outset of the AIDS epidemic, G.M.H.C. could be housed in one room of a former single-room-occupancy hotel at 318 West 22d Street. The space was donated by the landlord, Mel Cheren, who was converting the property into apartments. "No one would rent to them," he recalled, "plus there was no money."

Soon, the agency expanded to another room. Then another. Then it took up three-quarters of the house. With its case load growing, G.M.H.C. moved its headquarters in 1984 to 254 West 18th Street, where it still has an office. (Mr. Cheren turned his building into the 20-room Colonial House Inn.)

Then it expanded to Perry Street. Then to 24th Street. Then to 26th Street. In 1986, the agency bought and renovated a six-story, 37,500-square-foot building at 129 West 20th Street. That sufficed until 1990, when it needed an extra 10,000 square feet. It rented space at 20 West 20th Street. In two years, it needed another 20,000 square feet and found it at 121 West 20th Street. A year later, it needed another 12,500 and found it at 10 West 20th Street. The annual rent is now $456,559.

"We're coming again to that fork in the road when we have to decide whether to look for a building where we can consolidate," Mr. Richardson said. He emphasized that discussions were quite preliminary, that no plan had been devised and that the board would ultimately make the decision. Factored into that decision, he said, will be the geographic range of the agency's service.

"There is a lot of discussion about G.M.H.C.-Brooklyn or G.M.H.C.-Bronx," Mr. Richardson said. "What is important is the sentiment I hear from a lot of people that regardless of how it may look, we will always have some presence in Chelsea and the Village."

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