The Lower East Side, where Independent’s new home on Pier 36 is located, is today known as an artistic neighborhood. However, its history stretches back more than a century. While much of the area—originally an entire chunk of Manhattan bounded by 14th to Fulton Street to the north and south, and Broadway to the west—was first settled by the Lenape tribe and then used as farmland during the city’s early colonial history, by the 19th century it had transformed into a dense urban landscape where generations of immigrants lived, mainly in crowded tenement buildings

The poor living conditions among these communities prompted Lillian Wald, the pioneering humanitarian and nurse, to establish the Henry Street Settlement in 1893, where she offered free health care, social services and cultural education to Lower East Side residents. (Henry Street continues this important mission today and Independent has partnered with the non-profit to support its program through a fundraising gala during the fair’s opening.) Around the same time, the social reformer and photographer Jacob Riis published his images of Mulberry Street in the book How the Other Half Lives (1890), forcing city officials to recognize and work to improve housing in the area.

That was the state of the city when the artist and gallerist Gracie Mansion started looking for a more permanent space to show her own work and that of her friends in the early 1980s, after organizing shows in impromptu spaces like her apartment’s bathroom. “It was scary. It was like a war zone,” she says of the Lower East Side at the time. “There was a reason why the rents were so cheap.” The going rent for a gallery, she recalls, was about $500 a month. When her collaborator Sur Rodney found a space on East 10th Street, Mansion thought, “there's no decision here. Of course, it has to be that one, because of the reference to the earlier galleries that started there.” 

Nearby, Patti Astor and Bill Stelling’s Fun Gallery was showing the work of graffiti and street artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Lee Quiñones, and Futura 2000, and Civilian Warfare was launching the careers of artist like David Wojnarowicz, Luis Frangella and Richard Hambleton. Nature Morte, started by artists Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, was presenting more conceptually inclined work by artists like Gretchen Bender, Vito Acconci, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober, Barbara Kruger, Richard Pettibone and Laurie Simmons.

Fuentes grew up in the Lower East Side as a child, and remembers seeing Haring chalk drawing on the street, so returning to the old neighborhood to realize his professional aspirations of opening his own space felt serendipitous. “It was this moment where the atmosphere that I was raised in was suddenly meeting my new paradigm, my interest in art,” he says. “It just felt so right.” Moving a little further north to Delancey Street in 2010, Fuentes was soon joined by other galleries, including Feature, Callicoon Fine Arts, Shoot the Lobster, and Brennan & Griffin. And although Fuentes relocated his gallery to Tribeca in 2024, following a larger gallery migration there, he now serves on the board of the Henry Street Settlement. “I feel actually more connected to the community than ever,” he says. 

And while many of the galleries that first opened on the Lower East Side eventually moved to larger spaces in SoHo or Chelsea, another generation of artists and dealers continue to take their place. “Even when the gallery was just in my head, I always imagined it down here,” says dealer David Pagliarulo, who opened David Peter Francis on East Broadway in 2024, when he was 28-years-old. “Mostly because, when I think of galleries and location, everything feels so related to place.”

Part of that placehood was the neighborhood’s experimental history. “I think it's more expansive, more open in that way. It feels like you can kind of do whatever you want,” Pagliarulo says. In concurrent presentations at Independent and at his gallery in May, for example, he is showing work by the American artist Carrie Schneider, who pushes photography into the realm of sculpture by creating large scale prints hundreds of feet long that fold and bend over themselves into makeshift structures. Schneider will also be featured in this year’s Venice Biennale.

Pagliarulo points to the cooperative space Orchard, which was run by a collective of artists, filmmakers, critics, historians, and curators for only three years, from 2005-08, as an important reference point for his own program. “They're the icons in so many ways,” he says. The crucial work of Orchard will be preserved as part of The New York Gallery History Project, an initiative run by Independent and the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Contemporary Art Library that gives open and searchable access to an online archive of important New York City exhibitions by key galleries that are no longer in operation, from the 1980s to today. 

Pagliarulo adds that the arrival of gallerists from outside of the city, who are opening spaces on the Lower East Side, is a sign of the continued excitement around the area. One example is Hong Kong’s Kiang Malingue, which is also taking part in Independent with Taiwanese artist Tseng Chien-Ying, showing work created during a recent residency at the Lower East Side studio 99Canal. “The Lower East Side will always be a place for art,” Pagliarulo says. “It's never gonna go away.”