“With Moishe’s Moving,” Mr. Lemay said, “we were a success overnight because at the time movers in New York were working from 9 to 5, and I promised 24-7. With document storage, we were the first to use a bar code system, so if you needed something, I could promise you delivery in two hours, when other companies promised two days.”

Mr. Lemay would not discuss the value of Mana Contemporary, which is privately held and is part of the Moishe’s empire, nor would he say how much the company is spending on the center, which includes a handful of nonprofit foundations but is mostly, as Mr. Lemay puts it, “a business,” meant to turn a profit. His current reticence notwithstanding, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2011 that Mr. Mana’s company had put $4 million to $6 million into renovating the first 500,000 square feet. Today, the space is 1.5 million square feet on 35 acres, of which about 150,000 square feet are devoted to the foundations, including galleries and public areas. Mr. Lemay said that Mr. Mana had given him a completely free hand in running the center.

“This is the heart of Mana” Shai Baitel, Mana’s vice president for strategy, said of the nonprofit part of the business. “And even the parts of the property that are for-profit, like the artist studios, are open to the public to come in and see — to watch the artists at work, to get inspired and to learn.”

It was a chance encounter with the Israeli photo-realist painter Yigal Ozeri that led Mr. Lemay to build Mana. As Mr. Ozeri remembers it, his first conversation with Mr. Lemay was about creating a museum of graffiti. But they quickly saw that bigger things were possible. The art storage business was the key: some of Moishe’s clients were major collectors, so why not build a space where they could show their collections instead of keeping them crated? Several jumped at the chance.

“Of course they did,” Mr. Lemay said. “Storage is a graveyard. If you have a collection of, say, 4,000 pieces, you want people to see them.”

From there, the idea mushroomed. In 2011 Mr. Lemay built studios for himself and Mr. Ozeri, and Mr. Ozeri used his contacts in the art world to attract other artists to the space. About 120 painters, sculptors and photographers now have studios at Mana. Mr. Baitel said that there would be 200 by the end of the year, and 250 by early 2014.