Chelsea: galleries & garages. (Notebook).

There is a pathetic story of a man from Connecticut who, a few years ago, took his Porsche to be repaired in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, only to find that an art gallery--and a big one, too--had usurped the space where his garage had been. What's more, in the very spot where the jack-lift had raised his car for servicing, there stood a hefty installation by Tony Smith. The man was out of the loop. He hadn't realized that his Chelsea, a place of garages, repair shops for upscale autos, taxi gaseterias, tire fixers, and huge warehouses, was morphing into an art arena where modishly dressed art dealers, doers, and buyers rubbed elbows with grungy mechanics groping the innards of cars and trucks.

For about a decade now, Chelsea, located on the far West Side of Manhattan, stretching roughly from 13th to 30th Streets between Ninth Avenue and the West Side Highway, has been the "new" art district, a giant salesroom for contemporary work (as in SoHo, there are no purveyors of Old Masters there). And if the larger of the new galleries somewhat resemble auto showrooms, well, you can't say they don't reflect the neighborhood.

Chelsea is the latest in a long run of Manhattan art districts--districts that have included 57th Street and the upper Madison Avenue area, the short-lived East Village phenomenon of the early 1980s, and the loft-and-small-factory precincts of SoHo that now make up a high-rent shopping mall. Unlike SoHo, which grew organically as a dealers' venue because artists lived and worked there, the Chelsea scene has been imposed on an unprimed neighborhood by dealers who wanted to get away from the clownish weekend bustle that SoHo has become. Looking for better spaces at cheaper rents in idle old buildings, they have, for the most part, found them. Some 150 galleries now operate in Chelsea, most of them defectors from SoHo or uptown.

Actually, there are two Chelseas. One consists of a genteel West 20s residential section and the General Theological Seminary's early nineteenth-century campus at Ninth Avenue. The second Chelsea is the neighborhood's industrial edge, once the site of warehouses, lumber and rail yards, breweries, factories, and freight handlers; now it is the art mart.

The name Chelsea--given to the entire area in the mid-nineteenth century by Thomas Clarke, a retired British Army captain who owned a large farm there--evokes the residential quarter of West London that was once the stomping ground of writers and artists such as Jonathan Swift, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The ambiance of New York's Chelsea does not quite measure up to West London's, however.

Unlike SoHo (a name that, even though the result of city planners' jargon, reminds one of the arty English neighborhood), Chelsea has never been an haven for artists. (There are a few exceptions, among them Louise Bourgeois, ensconced for years in a residential brownstone.) The inhospitable blocks of the Chelsea art district are a muddle of monolithic buildings that swallow up the people who come to visit them, and whose facades -- except for those now housing ground-floor galleries--offer no clue as to their purpose. Chelsea's lack of soul as an art neighborhood, its scarcity of feeding spots, and the fact that in winter it is the coldest place in the city, raked by sharp winds playing off the Hudson, do not encourage the kind of street life endemic to SoHo.

The pioneer Chelsea dealer is said to have been Larry Gagosian, who opened one of his many art venues on West 25th Street in 1985. But Chelsea hadn't ripened yet, and buyers kept their distance. He left, but is now back in an emporium a block away from his old spot. The real breakthrough was made in 1987 by the Dia Foundation (now the Dia Center for the Arts): it established an austere showcase in a ...