Flood damage in the East Village, October 30

For the last few weeks I had been planning to be in New York today. I was going to the Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim, hoped to see Christie's pre-auction exhibition of impressionist and modern art, and have dinner at Paola's. Thanks to Sandy I will be otherwise engaged.

There was an initial tendency to underestimate the impact of the storm on New York. Then we saw Breezy Point ablaze and began to understand the aftermath in Staten Island.  Over 40 New Yorkers died in the storm, more than 100 across the mid-Atlantic.

Many of the most interesting New York galleries are gathered close together in lower Manhattan, especially hard hit by the surging waters. Roberta Smith surveys the damage in the New York Times: 

Whatever you think of the actual art on any given day in Chelsea, regulars to the neighborhood are privy to a lot of human endeavor on the part of artists and art dealers. It is a gift. That point was brought home with special intensity when I returned on Wednesday and then again on Thursday, witnessing devastation everywhere, and also the purposeful reaction to it. On Wednesday, to the thunderous clatter of water pumps and generators, ashen-faced, sometimes teary-eyed art dealers, along with their staff members and often their artists, were pulling sodden furniture, computers and irreplaceable archival documentation and artworks from their dark, water-blasted galleries. There were huge piles of wet, crumpled cardboard on the street. “You know, most people look at this and think it’s just cardboard,” said Michael Jenkins, a partner in Sikkema Jenkins & Company, on West 22nd Street. “They don’t realize that all of it was wrapped around works of art.”... At every turn there was evidence of salvage and conservation, as well as rebuilding. Even on Wednesday workers were cutting away ruined drywall in galleries so it could be replaced; on Thursday trucks from lumber yards were delivering drywall and plywood. At CRG at 548 West 22nd Street, a floor that had been slick with water on Wednesday was a day later arrayed with tables for drying works on paper. Upstairs, where the Artist’s Book Fair was to have been held this weekend but had been canceled, the space had been converted into a kind of art hospital for drying out. For all these efforts, it was easy to wonder, on first encounter, if Chelsea would ever come back as an art district. And when I talked to dealers about what they thought, reactions were mixed. Asya Geisberg, whose 23rd Street gallery was flooded, said: “I worry about the longevity of Chelsea for smaller galleries. We don’t have the staff or resources to deal with this.” “My artists are helping me out,” she added. “Other people are helping me out, but it’s not enough.” On 22nd Street Andrew Kreps confirmed that he had lost most of his inventory in his flooded basement, and my next, perhaps undiplomatic, question to him was “Will you close?” But his immediate reaction was “No.” James Yohe, another 22nd Street gallerist, put it more romantically, “We’re here because we’re true believers.”