The New York Times has a detailed story on Chelsea’s gallery damage, though the real extent of the losses will likely never be known.

“We were expecting a foot of water, and we got four,” said David Zwirner, who was about to mount an exhibition of works by Luc Tuymans and Francis Alÿs at his gallery on West 19th Street. “There was a lot of damage, but it would be impossible at this point to say how much. I have a feeling that many of the pieces can be restored.”

Mr. Zwirner said that he had “prepared diligently” and had moved much of his art to his warehouse in Queens, which he said was untouched.

“But the gallery itself was hit hard,” he said, despite his having piled up sandbags in the hope of keeping the water out. Besides artwork, he lost computers, furniture and flat files that had been stored on the ground floor.

Jerry Saltz toured the damage:

• Printed Matter as box after box of their own printed editions and titles were brought up from the basement and thrown into dumpsters. All lost.
• I saw paintings being carried from Friedrich Petzel’s flooded 22nd Street space to dry storage in his new space on 18th Street.
• From the outside it looked as though a bomb had gone off inside 303 Gallery.
• I saw torrents of water rushing out of Gagosian’s cavernous 21st Street space. When I ducked under the door I saw a large lone Henry Moore sculpture standing in inches of water. A sub-ground level space on West 19th Street, filled as if it were a swimming pool, had paintings floating in more than 15 feet of water.

Where Creations Faced Destruction (NYTimes)

Saltz’s Devastating Tour through Chelsea’s Ruined Art Galleries (New York Magazine)