For high-end dealers from Europe and the East Coast, the conversation around the changing landscape of downtown L.A.’s Arts District is less about culture than it is about commerce and calculation.

They argue it was only a matter of time before the abandoned strip of industrial land between Alameda Street and the Los Angeles River got caught in a rapid process of commercialization, with little room for nostalgia for the artists era of the 1970s.

More than 50 new galleries of all hues have opened in Los Angeles since 2013, 20 of them last year alone in the Arts District.

“From a business perspective, you have the opportunity here to get space at a massive scale for a fraction of the cost you’d pay in New York,” said Graham Steele, senior director at international art gallery Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, which opened downtown in March after signing a 10-year lease in 2014.

At a massive 113,000 square feet, the latest megagallery of the Switzerland-based enterprise, which also has a pair of locations in New York, is one of L.A.’s newest and most intimidating art imports. A former flour mill, it covers an entire city block at the north end of the 52-block Arts District.

It joins a recent movement of blue-chip galleries to Los Angeles, among them New York’s Maccarone and Venus Over New York. The gallerists have been drawn westward by an irresistible narrative: a hardscrabble artists’ community reinventing as a commercially viable hotbed for artists, collectors, and middlemen.

“It isn’t as though we’d have opened the gallery if there weren’t any collectors,” said Steele. “But primarily, it was because so many of our artists are based in downtown L.A. and the location was really chosen with the artists in mind.”

Philippe Vergne, director at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art and former director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, likened the environment in the Arts District to the vibe in New York a generation ago.

“Between Spruth Magers, Night Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Maccarone, and Venus, if we look at the downtown L.A. area, the standards are pretty high,” he said. “We saw this happen in SoHo in the early ’80s and in Chelsea over the last 15 years.”

Overcoming misconceptions

But New York is a tried and tested market – both as a lure to artists and the moneyed collectors who support them – and continues to have four times as many high-grossing art fairs and galleries as Los Angeles.

Steele said headway is being made in that direction.

“In terms of market, New York used to make an enormous amount of sense in the ’90s, but five years ago, it came down to a conversation about ambitions and the changes in L.A.,” said Steele. “This is a more dynamic, exciting context than anywhere else.”

Buzzing with organic coffee outposts selling $6 lattes, a weekend run to the crowded Arts District is proof that there is at the very least an appetite for window shopping. The mere density of galleries has made the neighborhood a destination.

But are L.A. collectors actually buying?

Apparently they are.

“There is a huge base of informed and intelligent collectors in Los Angeles who would previously have traveled to New York,” said Anna Furney, director of Venus Over Los Angeles, a bubble-gum pink 15,000-square-foot gallery that opened early last year in the heart of the Arts District. “It’s not just a client base but also a critical base which wants to see art it can talk about.”

Building a retail business requires a relationship with suppliers of high-quality product, and many of the galleries that have recently opened in Los Angeles have set up shop first with an eye on cultivating talent.

“For us,” Furney explained, “it was mostly an opportunity to engage with artists we wouldn’t be able to work with in New York and give them carte blanche.”