Subscribe to our newsletter Privacy Policy Success! Your account was created and you’re signed in. Please visit My Account to verify and manage your account. An account was already registered with this email.
Please check your inbox for an authentication link. We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member .
Contemporary art gallery owner and philanthropist Gloria Naftali spent much of her life turning a Chelsea warehouse at 508-534 West 26th Street into an affordable home for artists, photographers, and galleries and assured its tenants it would remain that way well after her death. “I was the first person on the floor and took a space with no walls and I was told by her I don’t ever have anything to worry about,” sculptor and mixed-media artist Arlene Rush, who has been a tenant in the building for 30 years, said in an interview with Hyperallergic . “A lot of people were told that, since we’re long-term tenants here.
” The family’s estate had other ideas. Two years after Naftali died in 2022 at the age of 96, the trustees of the Raymond and Gloria Foundation quietly put the 400,000-square-foot commercial building up for sale for $170 million and began soliciting bids for a new owner last December, as first reported by the Commercial Observer . Derek Wolman, a real estate attorney with Davidoff Hutcher & Citron and co-executor of Naftali’s estate, said the primary goal .
