“This neighborhood is just kind of an obscure backwater,” Jim Wintner said of the South Street Seaport. “It’s not going to be that any more.”

Certainly not if Wintner and Richard Sack are the prescient pioneers that they believe themselves to be. Last month the two men opened PhotoGraphic Gallery at 252 Front St. (212-252-2280), just down the block from Sciame Development’s Historic Front Street project, which includes 95 new apartments and 13 new retail spaces.

Anticipating the opening of that development, along with more residential conversions in the Financial District and the planned renovation of the East River waterfront,

the partners envision their new gallery within an “esplanade of leisure,” with shops, restaurants and other galleries in and around the vacated Fulton Fish Market. Unlike other galleries, they see themselves as part of the late-night life of their redeveloped neighborhood. Even now, their hours are 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. five days a week.

“People have to take a chance on the arts,” said Sack, a real estate broker who worked as a photographer early in his career. “It’s not an easy thing to do.”

After more than two months of labor, the two men, both 62, have slickly transformed a warren of small offices into three gallery spaces—one of which is itself divided into three spaces—that place the viewer in a maze of discovery, with each gallery providing the intimate scale that is well-suited to looking at photographs.

The gallery’s inaugural show, on view until March 5, features the work of Kenneth Van Sickle and Barbara Mensch.

Fifty years separate the two sets of Van Sickle’s works in the exhibition. There are the gritty, documentary-style black-and-white photos of Paris, from 1955, and moody, infrared color images of New York City that he produced this year.

Mensch, a longtime South Street Seaport resident, shows portraits of Fulton Fish Market workers, part of a large documentary project undertaken in the early 1980s when the seaport was on the cusp of commercialization. Sack and Wintner say they want Lower Manhattan and New York to be the inspirations for much of the work that they show. “When you go to any small town outside of New York you’ll find a local art or photo gallery that may show interesting work but it’s tied to the location,” said Wintner, who also runs an online photo gallery, photoarts.com. “A lot of what gets shown in galleries in New York doesn’t have roots here. I grew up in New York and I sometimes feel alienated from that.”

“We’re very interested in high-end photographers,” Sack added. “Not necessarily in the money part of high end, but in high-quality work.”

Harold Reed, a former art dealer and theater producer who lives in the Seaport neighborhood and chairs Community Board 1’s Arts and Entertainment Committee, said the area is a natural spawning ground for art galleries.

“This could be a forerunner for what can be done here if it’s successfully marketed,” Reed said. “It could be a mini Soho or a mini Chelsea. I think it’s a natural.”

“My concern” he added, “is quality.”

Sack and Wintner are already dreaming of possibilities for their own space that may go beyond photography—readings and performances, perhaps. They said they are open to ideas.

“We’re older guys just trying to fill in the blanks,” said Sack. “Why not, in this stage of the game, do what you care about.”