Erica Orden gets the details on Phillips de Pury’s new Park Avenue sales rooms in the Wall Street Journal. The offices will remain in Chelsea along with some of the sale categories. With the announcement that Heritage will also be in the neighborhood, Lindsay Pollock points out that the crossroads of 57th and Park might become the new center point of the art market:

Phillips, with its two salesrooms, aims to sort its goods to suit them. The modernist Midtown venue will include the ground floor of the building, and will host the house’s single-owner sales, evening auctions and jewelry sales. The company’s red-brick Meatpacking District location, which overlooks the High Line promenade, will remain home to administrative offices, as well as design and photography sales. [….] The timing of the deal shows the lengths to which Phillips’s owners are willing to go to boost their profile. In early 2009, when both the art and real-estate markets were flat-lining, Phillips was in talks to become a tenant in a proposed redevelopment of Pier 57, which is located near its original headquarters on the western end of 15th Street. But around that same time, Mercury Group’s chief executive, Leonid Friedland, also paid his first visit to the Park Avenue space, according Phillips and Gregory Knoop, an executive vice president of Somerset Partners, LLC, a private-investment firm that oversees the property.

Auction House Turf War Comes to Midtown (Wall Street Journal)