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Dia currently occupies three different addresses along West 22nd Street.
Dia Art Foundation circa 1987 (L) and circa 2015 (R).
People said, Dont do this.
A lot of gallerists in Soho said, Thats nutty nobody will go.
The four-story site on 22nd Street looked prime for storage and maybe space to show art.
For six years before opening to the public, 548 West 22nd Street was used to store Dias collection.
The few people who made their way there were itinerant.
Otherwise, it was pretty dead.
There were whips and chains hanging from the ceiling, Stone said.
There was even a tub in the back for golden showers.
When Wright took on Dias directorship in 1986, he surveyed what remained in the foundations holdings.
You might be interrupted by drug deals or other things taking place.
It wasnt advertised you had to become aware of it by your involvement in contemporary art.
That foundational habit of withholding and restraint, Garrels said, had made Dia sites places of pilgrimage.
With such a legacy in mind, Wright worked to make previously secretive projects more public in nature.
At that time, critical theory was alive and thriving and under-recognized by institutions, Wright recalled.
I thought,Well, thats easy we could take that and stand out.
Dia Art Foundation circa 1987 (L) and circa 2015 (R).
Most prominently, Wright turned his attention to transforming the building on 22nd Street.
It was more of a reductive attitude than minimalist.
He kept his interventions to a minimum.
I dont think they would let you do that today, even in a concrete building.
The renovation of 22nd Street was exactly what artists needed, Holzer said.
Then came the art.
The Knoebel floor was given over to lacquered paintings and geometric arrangements of panels and boards.
As Garrels recalled, Sometimes on the weekend there wasnt a soul for blocks.
Wright, for his part, was begging gallerists to consider space [in Chelsea], he said.
Soho at that point was getting pricy, and you could get much more space up where we were.
I talked to every gallerist I knew.
It was a difficult argument to make, but there was hope.
It would be a while still.
This was the park on 22nd Street, where children now leave their toys trustfully overnight.
I never felt it was really dangerous, but it was a very unsavory neighborhood.
Hilton Kramer certainly thought so.
The allure for certain explorers was not lost on him entirely.
There was something about it that was kind of odd.
The fateful result of autoerotic asphyxiation, Stone said, is a vision that stuck in my mind.
We thought, Why dont we bring it to Chelsea and improve the neighborhood?
Soho at that point had already become a shopping mall, Garrels remembered.
This was like the old-school New York art world there was a recovery of some of that spirit.
I had a good sense of uptown and downtown, and I wanted the two worlds to mix.
Chelsea could be a meeting place and bring different cohorts of the art world together.
The inevitable shift would mark a symbolic beginning, he wrote.
And such a symbolic beginning requires a marker.
They sent us more stones than we needed, Garrels recalled.
They said, New York is so tough youll probably need a couple extras.
I actually still have some extras, he said.
It would be another decade or so before there was any kind of mass Chelsea gallery migration.
There was some rough stuff.
On Sunday mornings I would pick up knives.
I took a big black garbage bag full of knives to a hearing at City Hall.
You own a garage on 22nd Street!
It was like a brushfire, said Garrels.
There was not one building for people to be, Friedrich said of the inhospitable environs.
It was amazing you would not believe.
About Chelsea now, he sounded an upbeat note.
Its a blessed and positive district in Manhattan because it allows people to be in touch with each other.
But future phases for the neighborhood remain to be seen.
This is one of the main issues in the city.
All the commercialism is running to the sky.
Even for Dias dreamers, such commercialism once seemed improbable.
That wasnt the case.
Its all a glorious blur.
Andy Battaglia is the deputy editor ofARTnewsmagazine.
Photography by Michele Lanou.
Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.
