Few areas of Manhattan have changed as swiftly or as radically in recent years as 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Today, it is a very different place from what it was just 12 months ago, let alone five years ago.

If Chelsea is the universal center of contemporary art, this is the center of Chelsea, its Gold Coast. Among its stars are blue-chip venues like the museumsized Gagosian Gallery, as well as three others, Luhring Ausustine, Andrea Rosen, and Marianne Boesky, that in the past month have opened dazzlingly redesigned spaces.

And then there are the three huge residential structures that have been completed in the past year: the Tate, Chelsea Condos, and Vesta 24.

True, the first two are through-block buildings whose main entrances are on 23rd Street, a major cross-town thoroughfare. But even if West 23rd Street’s fortunes have improved along with the rest of Chelsea, one suspects that the monied purchasers of these condos really want to look down on 24th Street, on the artists, critics, and dealers, as well as that swelling bevy of their hangers-on, who pound these pavements with a vengeance.

But how strange it must be to live here. Consider that not a scrap of anything edible can be purchased from one end of it to the other. And though everything here is for sale, none of it will be had for much less than $100,000. Meanwhile this street is hemmed in by the ever-charming West Side Highway to the west and by the rotting, rusting High Line to the east.

Already several one- or two-story structures that house car-repair shops are deserted, and the rest are being eyed by developers. Consider that, when the 22 units in Vesta 24 went on sale, long before they were ever built, and even though they ranged in price between $1.6 million to $3.5 million, it took all of 36 hours to sell every last one of them

The two biggest residential buildings on the block, the Tate and Chelsea Studios, have already been discussed in this column in the past year. They are largely undistinguished brick-faced structures with a few vernacular adornments, though they are doubtless pleasant enough to inhabit. The 14-story Vesta 24, however, at 231 Tenth Ave., exhibits a bit more effort and invention. Designed by Garett Gourlay Architect, it is a collage of a tower, the sort of politely deconstructed composite that architects were designing five years ago: Most of the lower level, up to the 10th floor, is daringly clad in fancy wood facing, while the irregularly massed top and sides are covered in a shimmering white metal.

Occupying the lot immediately to the north is a car wash brazenly advertising its services. The effect is oddly reminiscent of Las Vegas, as if this were some artful reconstruction of a mythic, honky-tonk New York City rising out of the sands of Nevada. Doubtless, the developer and the inhabitants love that clash. Doubtless, too, that car wash is not long for this world.

Just across the way, on the north side of 24th Street, is the spanking new Marianne Boesky Gallery, which opened earlier this month. What distinguishes its exterior, designed by Deborah Berke & Partners, is the emphasis with which its disjointed sequence of glazed white brick, corrugated steel, and customized concrete block sums up all the aspirations and pretensions of contemporary Chelsea.

In the crisp angularity of its sundry parts, it, like so many other galleries on this street, is resolutely neo-modernist. But it makes obvious the implicit historicism in this modernist revival. Indeed, its bare-bones vocabulary is almost commonplace at this point. The façade is dominated by a squarish block of white brick — with a two-story mullioned window set into its mass — that seems to come crashing down on the horizontal metal strip that is the entrance. It is as aggressively modernist as the overrated High Line across the street.

As for the corrugated steel and the concrete blocks that flank the white brick center, they not only recall some of the more functional buildings down the street, but suggest the sturdy integrity that the art world, and so much of the art they traffic in, are pleased to imagine they embody. Whatever one thinks of these pretensions, however, the façade of the new Boesky Gallery at least has the virtue of harmoniousness.

On the same side of the street, a few doors west, is a single structure that houses two galleries — Luhring Augustine and Andrea Rosen — that have been improbably joined at the hip for much of their careers. Its expansive wooden façade has been painted brilliant forest green and is surrounded by red brick. This is the work of Gluckman Mayner Architects, a firm that, you could be excused for thinking, is responsible for half of the upscale galleries in Manhattan, including the hangar-like Gagosian Gallery down the street and the recently renovated fifthfloor galleries at the Whitney. This most recent labor, with Elizabeth Rexrode as project architect, is unexpectedly vernacular in such details as the patterning of the green façade, the fin-desiecle metalwork above it, and the raw, unfinished wooden accents that define the interior.

The massive infusion of money into this formerly industrialized zone — so unimaginable a mere 10 years ago—has fundamentally altered the spirit of the neighborhood. Though many of the new galleries aspire to the proletarian contextualism of the Marianne Boesky Gallery, the new arrivals are ultimately irreconcilable with the auto-shops to which they imagine they are paying tribute. A spurious equilibrium between them, which appeared to hold up for a few years, has finally broken down, as a deluge of conspicuous consumption takes all before it.

jgardner@nysun.com