During the pre-millennial stock market boom, the rumors flew fast and furiously. But the Fuller Building was turned into neither a glossy condominium nor a corporate headquarters, nor the world’s largest Gap. Today, the Art Deco tower at the corner of East 57th Street and Madison Avenue is still the fulcrum of one of the most important concentrations of art galleries in the world. While this one building itself houses more than two dozen galleries, scores of others are to be found all along 57th Street, particularly those blocks between Second and Eighth Avenues, as well as on several intersecting avenues.

One of Manhattan’s major cross-town thoroughfares, 57th Street stretches about three miles from the East River to the Hudson. A veritable panorama of midtown, it is lined with handsome apartment houses at its easternmost extremity, grimy commercial structures at the western end, with prestigious retail stores and architecturally distinctive office buildings in between. It is also the locus of Carnegie Hall, the Gilded Age music hall named for steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie and the turn-of-the-century domicile of the Art Students League, where Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Henri and John Sloan served as teachers, and George Bellows, Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper were students.

While some of the art and antiques galleries on 57th Street are internationally renowned, there are others that exhibit emerging artists or have distinctive purviews. Throckmorton Fine Art Inc., 145 East 57th, specializes in Chinese art and decorative objects and contemporary and vintage photography from Asia and Latin America, along with tribal arts from Africa and Oceania. The gallery’s selection of scholar’s stones ($500 to $5,000) is especially fascinating. These naturally formed stones in beautiful, unusual and sometimes strange shapes were originally used as objects of contemplation by Chinese scholars. One savant called these rare geological specimens “wordless poetry.” Mounted on wooden stands, they range in size from desk-top pieces to 4 feet in height and/or width. “I collected rocks as a child and am still doing it,” says Spencer S. Throckmorton III, president. Wally Findlay Galleries International Inc., 124 East 57th, is the place to go for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, including paintings by Louis Valtat, Maurice de Vlaminck and Pierre Bonnard. Findlay also shows works by contemporary European realists, such as Croatian artists Rinaldo Skalamera and Zvonimir Mihanovic. Last spring, a show of Skalamera’s idyllic boating scenes ($6,000 to $20,000) sold out the first weekend it was on view at Findlay’s East Hampton gallery, notes James Borynack, chairman and CEO. Mihanovic is similarly marine-minded, often depicting fishing villages that bring to mind the small ports of the Dalmatian coast. Mihanovic’s oils run from $80,000 to $180,000; watercolors start at $14,000.

Among the dealers in the Fuller Building, 41 East 57th, Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery displays 20th-century American art, including Modernist works from the 1930s by painters like Balcomb Greene, as well as contemporary landscapes, abstracts and semi-abstracts. Tom Ferrara, for instance, who has shown with the gallery since 1986, was principal assistant to Willem de Kooning for about eight years, says owner Perlow, who adds, “Some people think he’s the better artist.” While Ferrara’s paintings build upon abstract foundations with their dynamic brushwork, his forthright patches and slashes of ochre, slate blue and deep mulberry often look as if they were peeling away to reveal deeper colors within. A typical 40-inch by 36-inch Ferrara painting sells for $6,200.