Chelsea has had shifting history as an area of merchant class row-houses, transformed briefly into a theater district, and then a largely immigrant community. By the 1980s the modern revival of Chelsea was underway. It shares a similar character to the West Village. Manhattan’s LGBTQ community had already begun to shift north from the Village, and art galleries began to open in former industrial and loft spaces. It has restaurants and boutiques on its side streets, and a busy nightlife scene along the main drag on Eighth Avenue.

The neighborhood is now the center of the NYC Art scene with over 200 galleries and the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. Chelsea’s High Line Park, repurposed from elevated light-rail tracks, is among New York’s most visited sites. It leads to Hudson Yards in Northwest Chelsea, one of the largest new developments in recent years, with its eminently photographable ‘Vessel’. It is a city within a city. The first Hudson Yards office tower was completed in 2016, and we are actively selling residential luxury condos here and along the High Line. Notable traditional Chelsea architecture includes a Landmarked Historic District of Greek Revival and Italianate townhouses; plus the historic General Theological Seminary campus. Chelsea runs west of Sixth Avenue, south of 34th Street to 14th Street to the Hudson River. It includes the popular Landmarked Meatpacking District, a center of downtown nightlife today, which started as a food processing, warehouse district. I was a founding member of Corcoran’s Chelsea office and I love the neighborhood for both its strong sense of community and as the center of the NYC Arts scene.

The Flatiron District derives its name from the iconic Flatiron Building at 23rd Street, between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Madison Square Park lies to its north and Union Square to its south; with Park Avenue on its eastern border and Sixth Avenue its western one. It is about as central as is possible in Manhattan. Flatiron was a fashionable shopping district in the late 19th Century, this was part of the “Ladies’ Mile”. Cast-iron buildings that line its streets are reminders of that period. The area declined as a shopping district after World War I, as the retail stores moved north. The area would be later known as the Toy District and the Photo District, monikers after the industries that found their way to relatively cheap and spacious loft buildings. Artists and urban pioneers began to revive the historic buildings as live-work loft spaces in the 1980s. While the department stores have moved on, the stately buildings that housed them remain. Today, The Ladies Mile is a Landmarked Historic District of splendid buildings that are a mix of residential, live-work, and creative office space. The district also has a great mix of restaurants, with something for everyone including the grand bazaar of everything Italian, Eataly.