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A walking route through Chelsea's art galleries

A 12-stop walking route through the art galleries of Chelsea, ordered so you walk 0.6 mi instead of doubling back.

This is the densest concentration of major galleries anywhere in the world, and the walk is almost embarrassingly easy: the district is a grid of long blocks between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the West 20s, and most of the buildings hold several galleries stacked on different floors. Look for building directories in the lobbies — you will often find four or five spaces at a single address.

Budget more time than the walking distance suggests. The exhibitions here are frequently museum-scale, and the temptation to spend twenty minutes in a single room is real. Thursday evenings are when new shows open and the streets fill up; if you prefer quiet, come on a weekday afternoon.

Getting to the start: C or E to 23rd St, 1 to 23rd St, or L/A/C/E to 14th St–8th Ave.

Chelsea has 17 galleries on our map. This route takes the 12 that sit closest together — the walkable core of the district — because a 17-stop walk is a list, not a route. The full Chelsea directory has the rest.

Practical notes for this walk

Best time to go. Weekday afternoons for quiet, Thursday evenings for openings. Avoid Sunday and Monday, when nearly everything is shut.

Worth knowing. Several addresses on this route hold multiple galleries on different floors. Check the lobby directory before you leave a building — you can easily double your count without walking another block.

Combine it with. The High Line runs directly through the district and is the obvious way to break the walk in half. The Whitney sits at its southern end.

The route

  1. ACA Galleries est. 1932 — website ↗173 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 2 min on foot
  2. Matthew Marks Gallery — website ↗522 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 2 min on foot
  3. Isabel Sullivan Gallery | Chelsea — website ↗501 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  4. Taglialatella Galleries — website ↗229 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  5. Boesky Gallery — website ↗507 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  6. Gladstone Gallery — website ↗515 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  7. Luhring Augustine Gallery — website ↗531 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  8. Gagosian — website ↗555 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  9. Pace Gallery — website ↗540 W 25th St, New York, NY 10001, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  10. The FLAG Art Foundation — website ↗545 W 25th St 9th Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA↓ a few steps to the next stop — about 1 min on foot
  11. Agora Gallery — website ↗530 W 25th St, New York, NY 10001, USA↓ 0.1 mi to the next stop — about 3 min on foot
  12. High Line Nine — website ↗507 West 27th Street, 508 W 28th St, New York, NY 10001, USA

How this route was built. We ordered these stops by their actual coordinates, using a nearest-neighbour path improved with a 2-opt pass, so the sequence is close to the shortest walk that visits every stop once. The walking times assume a steady city pace of about 4.5 km/h including traffic lights, and count only the walking — not the time you will spend inside.

Galleries close, move and change their hours. Check before you set out, and treat this as a suggested order rather than a schedule.

← See all of these on the interactive map