212 Bowery. Image via Google maps.

After 13 years in Chelsea, dealer and fair organizer Andrew Edlin is headed to the Lower East Side.

Edlin’s new home will be 212 Bowery, just a few feet away from the New Museum and in the heart of a thriving gallery neighborhood, with Sperone Westwater, Salon 94, and Eleven Rivington nearby. The International Center of Photography is also setting up shop at 250 Bowery (see International Center of Photography Will Move to the Bowery). Currently, 212 is home to a restaurant supply store.

“13 years has gone fast,” Edlin told artnet News by phone from his gallery at 134 Tenth Avenue, though he has seen the rise of Chelsea as a gallery neighborhood, dealers having begun to colonize the area only a few years before he opened there, first at 529 West 20th Street. His neighbors currently include Alexander and Bonin and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, along with the soon-to-close French restaurant La Luncheonette.

The move represents a considerable expansion of his exhibition space, from 1,700 square feet to about 2,500. His last Chelsea show will be this summer; architect Jee Won Kim will start work at that time on the Lower East Side site, which Edlin hopes to open by early fall.

Edlin also runs Wide Open Arts, an organization run out of his gallery space that puts on the Outsider Art Fair in New York and Paris and will make the move along with the gallery.

The Tenth Avenue block he’s leaving will likely be home to a condominium building, he said, and noted that the Outsider Art Fair has also lost its Chelsea home to real estate developers (see Owner of Former Dia Building Ousts Independent Fair and Zach Feuer).

Edlin focuses on outsider artists like Henry Darger, Susan Te Kahurangi King, and Marcel Storr, along with contemporary artists including multidisciplinary artist Chris Doyle and sculptor and filmmaker Brent Green.

Upstairs at 212 Bowery is ModelFIT, a high-end gym that aims to help you look like a model; it replaced the studio of fashion photographer Terry Richardson, according to Bowery Boogie, which also reports that an eight-story residential building will go up next door, at 210 Bowery. Acadia Realty Trust set a price-per-square-foot record for the Bowery when it bought that building in 2012 for $7.5 million, or $815 per square foot, according to the New York Post.

“We looked in Chelsea but we couldn’t find the right space,” Edlin said. “They’re just not there anymore.”