Elsewhere in Chelsea, experience an event that many of us thought we’d never see: SoHo stalwart Nancy Hoffman—she’s been there since December 1972, she reminded me—has finally flown her downtown coop and is opening up at 520 West 27th Street. She’ll be on the first and second floors of another new building, an 11-story “commercial condominium” designed by Chelsea-based architects FLAnk. Hoffman agrees the move marks the end of an era for her gallery, but told me that she’s been contemplating it for five years. “The time has come,” she says, citing the “critical mass” of galleries in Chelsea as opposed to SoHo. It comes as something of a surprise, but apparently Saturdays can be very quiet in her West Broadway space. The ongoing construction work on 27th Street means that she can’t put an exact date on her move, though she has the “romantic notion” that it might happen for the gallery’s 35th anniversary in December. Whenever it happens, the new Nancy Hoffman Gallery will be another striking location: She promises a “more exciting” space than other Chelsea galleries, the white-cube norm of which she calls “over-architected.” She has 30 feet of street frontage, 22-foot ceilings, and—you guessed it—plenty of natural light, this time from extensive clerestory windows. And she too will have a sculpture garden.

Hoffman calls the move the beginning of a “new adventure.” What is inevitable is that her departure from West Broadway, taken in tandem with new arrivals half a mile or so east of there, will undoubtedly precipitate further moves in, around, and out of the neighborhood that is SoHo.