CHELSEA FLOWERS

For many years, it was a comfortably funky-liberal-middle class enclave of orderly brownstones and neat, six-story apartment buildings. Today, Chelsea’s in the throes of change. No longer is it one neighborhood, but a mini-city, where each sector has its own raison d’etre. At its center, the sprawling, noirish Chelsea Hotel (once home to Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Sid Vicious), unrepentant and scuzzy. Other landmarks? The Joyce Theatre; the Empire Diner; Jensen Lewis, that Euro-smart furniture store; the London Terrace apartments, built in 1930. But now, the formerly moldering industrial district on Chelsea’s West Side has been transformed into New York’s hottest gallery district–with its own Chelsea Market, offering fresh food and flowers, and with the requisite fashion emporiums in place--Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, et al. Sixth Avenue in the teens to mid-Twenties, meanwhile, is undergoing a metamorphosis. Megastores have taken over the grand 19th century emporium spaces that once defined the area as Ladies' Mile. Further north, high-rise mega condos have appeared, as if overnight. Not to forget the Chelsea Piers Sports Complex, located on the Hudson River.

Like the neighborhood, the Chelsea persona is a chameleon - an energetic ingenue with an outrageous mixture of styles. Eclectic to the core, she loves the laid-back aura of the old side-streets, the charm of the gallery district, and the dynamism of the new Sixth Avenue. She never leaves the Market without a big bouquet of flowers.

Chelsea Flowers smells like an exuberant bouquet of peonies, tulips, hyacinth, magnolia and rose. Caught at the peak of freshness, imagine they've just been wrapped at the Chelsea Market, and are reconnoitering the galleries, leaving traces not just of insolently fresh flowers, but of the musk, sandalwood, vetiver and treemoss that surround them.