The Decline of the West

Timothée Chalamet’s success has brought attention to the Midtown building where he was raised, the unmemorable Manhattan Plaza, a project-based, Section 8 Mitchell-Lama development with a mandate that 70 percent of tenants—such as his mother, a former Broadway dancer and current real estate broker for the Corcoran Group—work in the performing arts. Downtown, another federally funded housing complex for artists boasts a reputation whose name alone conjures up art-world mystique: Westbeth. While none of its tenants have played Bob Dylan in a Hollywood film, they are likely to have crossed paths with Dylan himself. Residents have included photographer Diane Arbus, Fugs frontman Ed Sanders, saxophonist Billy Harper, sculptor Hans Haacke, poets Muriel Rukeyser and Joel Oppenheimer, and the video- and performance-art power couple Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota. Merce Cunningham’s revolutionary dance studio was based there for forty years in a space that is now leased by the Martha Graham Company, and Keith Haring had his first solo show at Westbeth in 1981. The West Village Halloween Parade, founded by tenant Ralph Lee, first marched in the Westbeth courtyard.

A new book by Peter Trachtenberg tries to capture both the mythology and the mundane realities of this exceptional corner of New York, which opened in 1970. Designed by Richard Meier to evoke Corbusian ideals of communalism, Westbeth at its outset uniquely combined federal and private funds to provide subsidized housing for hundreds of artists. It comprises an entire city block bounded by West, Bethune, Bank, and Washington Streets—the name Westbank was apparently never floated—on what was a semi-industrial stretch disconnected from the Village. But the planners’ even grander vision of a nationwide network of publicly funded artists lofts was never realized, making Westbeth a relic of a more optimistic and forward-thinking time, a freak, like the platypus, on the evolutionary tree of New York housing.

The idea for Westbeth grew out of the broader push to create live-work spaces for artists in old lower Manhattan factory buildings in the 1960s. It found an unlikely backer in Jacob Merrill Kaplan. Born and raised in poverty in the city of Chelsea, near Boston, Kaplan worked in the sugar and molasses industries in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the 1920s, eventually becoming a millionaire and buying the Welch’s Grape Juice company. He was a political progressive with a strong interest in cooperatives, and he sold Welch’s to its growers in the 1950s. Kaplan used his prodigious wealth to create a philanthropic foundation, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, to give in his name and bolster the endowments of institutions like the New School and Carnegie Hall.

Another of Kaplan’s beneficiaries was the Institute of International Labor Research, a CIA cutout run by a Romanian veteran of Voice of America and the anticommunist left. This institute ran political education centers in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Costa Rica that trained activists from across Latin America in cooperatism, trade unionism, and anticommunism and published journals in Spanish advocating the same. Kaplan began to donate to it in 1960, and for three years, beginning in 1961, the Kaplan Fund funneled over $1 million from the CIA into the institute. When this came to light in 1964, as a result of an IRS inquiry into the Kaplan Fund’s finances, it became a public scandal not only due to the CIA’s covert operations but because the unassuming Kaplan was best known as “a dapper, spry man of 71 who uses public transportation,” as Nora Ephron put it while covering the story as a cub reporter for the New York Post.

In 1967, Kaplan admitted to his role as a conduit of CIA funds. That same year, he turned his attention to the question of housing artists, purchasing for the Argentine sculptor Marcelo Bonevardi a former ironworks factory at the corner of Twelfth and Greenwich Streets. The Kaplan Fund subsidized a renovation, then turned it over to Bonevardi and other artists to run. The New York Times called it “the first low-income housing co-operative for artists in the city.” Building on this success, Kaplan cofounded Housing for Cultural Activities, Inc. (HCA), which began to bankroll artists’ lofts downtown. His partner in the venture was Roger L. Stevens, a New York theater producer and the first chairman of the recently created National Endowment for the Arts. They used a matching grant from the federal government to renovate a factory building, then still partially in use, at Spring and Mercer Streets, which they sold to minimalist artist Donald Judd. The organization also provided seed money to Fluxus founder George Maciunas so that he could purchase three SoHo buildings and turn them into artists lofts. The only one that came to fruition was 80 Wooster Street, the legendary Fluxhouse, which also housed Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Today, it’s credited with being SoHo’s first artists loft, leading to the transformation of that neighborhood and other parts of New York and the world.

Here is where Trachtenberg picks up his story. With Westbeth, Kaplan and Stevens wanted to design a model of government-subsidized artists’ housing that could scale up and be replicated in cities throughout the country. Bell Laboratories, which had operated since 1898 on what was called the Lower West Side, was moving to New Jersey and selling the several buildings that made up its campus. The technology for the first talking picture, LP, and TV transmissions were first tested there in the 1920s, and it was a research site for the Manhattan Project—a subject of speculation among Westbeth tenants to this day. With a low-interest mortgage from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a tax abatement from the city, and investments of, eventually, $1.5 million each from Kaplan and the government, the pair purchased the enormous complex.

Kaplan’s son, Richard D. Kaplan, was an architect on the team that built the Brutalist Chatham Towers (1964) in Chinatown and led the design of Crown Gardens (1969) in Crown Heights. He brought on his friend Richard Meier, a classmate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who was then thirty-five and had only designed private homes. Meier had the challenge of uniting Bell’s separate buildings with minimal demolition. In an early example of adaptive reuse, he retrofitted the large rooms into live-work lofts by penciling into blueprints walls that were never built, allowing artists to design their own spaces. Meier was inspired partly by Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse in Marseille (1952), the most famous of the Unité d’habitation projects, in which skip-stop corridors connect duplex apartments. At Westbeth, Meier specified elevators that bypassed floors, and the larger of the 383 units were reserved for families with children. (Diane Arbus, the most famous resident then and now, lived alone but received preferential treatment and a spacious apartment.) Rather than clutter the cavernous interior courtyard with fire escapes, Meier added semicircular balconies, painted white, that doubled as second means of egress by connecting neighboring apartments. But his most unorthodox decisions lay not with what he built but what he retained from the original factory, including smokestacks and, as Trachtenberg puts it, “floors [that] still bear the footprint of machines.”

The opening days of Westbeth were heady. New York Magazine called it a “noble experiment.” Residents organized a vegetable co-op and a collectively run day care while taking advantage of the communal darkroom and studios for printmaking and other arts. Even the normally shy Arbus attended tenant meetings. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company staged performances with music by John Cage and sets by Jasper Johns. The formidable Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective and the Westbeth Gallery raised the complex’s profile with their provocative and well-received productions, beginning with Rape-In (1971). Although some of the commercial spaces remained vacant, which hampered Westbeth’s ability to make its mortgage payments, others were rented to Video Exchange, a studio that operated the first experimental video festival in New York, and, for its first forty years, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a synagogue that serves the LGBT community.

Trachtenberg approaches Westbeth like a Balzacian boardinghouse, organizing much of the book around profiles of individual artists, especially eccentrics, who labored in relative obscurity in this postindustrial space. Trachtenberg himself lived at Westbeth from 1995 to 2006, in an illegal sublet rented by the painter and writer Gay Milius. (Being scrupulous scofflaws, they bound the arrangement with a detailed lease.) Milius is thus the subject of one of Trachtenberg’s most intimate portraits. “After a much-anticipated 1981 SoHo gallery show that didn’t get reviewed or net major sales, the wonderful, lurid, quizzically romantic paintings of Gay’s thirties gave way to elaborately executed jokes,” he writes. Those gags in turn gave way to collecting, and the collecting to writing a novel that remained in manuscript form. “Gay’s artistic loneliness was made worse by poverty. He had no money and no job. He would have been homeless if his friends hadn’t kept paying the rent on his loft.” Living in Westbeth gave Milius additional stability “in a community that didn’t view [artists] as idlers and freaks.”

Another tenant whose life and career Trachtenberg carefully traces goes by her stage name, Black-Eyed Susan. A member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Susan moved into Westbeth in 1980, after years of living in derelict flats. “It saved me,” she tells Trachtenberg, “because I could have my own apartment, and it was affordable. And I could have a part-time job to help me pay for it.” But Westbeth wasn’t exactly a utopia. Some neighbors looked down on her work, even when she caught a break and landed a role in Ironweed, the 1987 film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Ludlam died of AIDS in the same year, becoming just one of many friends Susan, and so many others in Westbeth, lost to the disease. Trachtenberg is drawn to the dark side of this artists’ paradise, lingering on tragedies such as the suicides of Arbus, in her bathtub, in 1971, and his friend Milius, on his sofa, in 2006. But he treats the AIDS crisis with special empathy.

We also get to know Barton Lidice Beneš, who carefully constructed Joseph Cornell–like boxes that incorporated found objects, including, as Trachtenberg describes, “money, human ashes, gallstones, pubic hair, scavenged bits of canvas and blobs of paint from the studios of more famous artists, and his own HIV-positive blood.” Beneš lived for forty-two years in a poorly lit unit crowded with his curiosities—collections of artifacts from Africa, the Amazon, and the South Pacific—a drafting table, apothecary cabinets, and the canopied, antique Chinese opium bed where he slept. According to Trachtenberg, he never held a job other than artist.

Meier, who received a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects for his work at Westbeth, seems to have overlooked the routine problems of bohemians cohabitating in close quarters. Noise from people and art projects bellowed through the central courtyard. Harry Roskolenko, a poet, lamented at the time, “The noise is so bad I started drinking. And as far as community living goes, I loathe it.” The painter Jack Dowling, who was interviewed by Trachtenberg before he died in 2021, complained that the difficulties went deeper than nuisances and that “Richard Meier knew nothing about artists and what they need.” Because apartments were allotted strictly according to family size, a sculptor without children might be working in a cramped unit while a writer with kids would enjoy a duplex with a surplus of studio space. Theater for a New City, which was supposed to be the resident acting company, left after being unable to pay its rent. Many resented the Kaplan Fund—particularly Kaplan’s daughter Joan Davidson, who served as Westbeth’s director after a job at Voice of America fell through—for representing uptown money. Even Donald Judd, whose nearby studio was developed by HCA, turned on his benefactors. In a blistering text, he criticized the Kaplan Fund’s connection to the CIA and the large amount of “pork barrel” federal funding steered toward Westbeth. “I’ve never met anyone who wanted Westbeth to exist, much less live in it,” he added. “It’s despised by everyone.” Maciunas considered Westbeth to be a betrayal of the more cavalier artists loft movement—yet recommended that those who couldn’t buy into his Fluxhouse apply for rooms there.

Upon completion, Westbeth had an income cap of $12,700, with studios renting at an affordable $118 per month and three-bedrooms going for $209. (Rent stabilization and Section 8 would later be implemented.) But rents were raised by 8 percent before the building even opened and another 7 percent after one year. In 1972, an announcement of a 17.4 percent increase set off weeks of demonstrations by tenants, who withheld rent in protest. “That’s actually what created the community,” recalls Christina Maile, a member of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective. “In many ways it was the rent strike.” Tenants eventually relented and agreed to a rent increase, which still failed to cover costs. In 1975, the Department of Housing and Urban Development took over Westbeth’s mortgage from the FHA. By 1983, Westbeth was almost $2.5 million behind on its payments and the government warned of foreclosure. The Residents’ Council proposed to turn Westbeth into a limited-equity cooperative, which would force tenants to purchase their apartments for approximately $10,000 to $18,000. With the majority of tenants claiming no assets and many earning under $15,000 per year, this plan was considered by a rival tenant group to violate Westbeth’s founding principles and would have effectively evicted half the building. More rent increases settled the co-op debate in 1986, but the tensions from this period continued to simmer for years.

As the book’s title suggests, Trachtenberg sees Westbeth as being in a state of decline, both in its self-contained mission and the bohemianism it represents. One “problem with Westbeth’s conception,” he writes, is that it has become a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. “The idea was those artists would move out after two years and younger artists who were struggling would move in,” Meier said forty years after work began on the project. “The problem was, there was no mechanism for moving them out and so they’re still living there today.” Longtime resident Edward Field, a poet who has won many prestigious awards, including an Oscar, turned 101 in June. Some tenants, such as Jenny Lombard, a writer and one of Trachtenberg’s informants, have taken over their parents’ apartments. “I know you could say we’re taking advantage,” Lombard concedes, “but on the other hand I think about the effect that having affordable rent has had on my life.” The lack of turnover prompted Davidson to declare Westbeth “a failure.”

The matter of its tenanting notwithstanding, some have wondered if Westbeth ever worked as intended. Tod Williams, an architect and occupant of Westbeth through its first three years, wondered why no unified artistic movement emerged from the building. In an interview with the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, he suggested that residents were “genuine artists, struggling artists” who were simply too busy trying to make ends meet. Trachtenberg writes, “Often the people who didn’t want to be bothered were just used to working alone and wanted to do nothing but that…. There were the ones who wanted to build community and the ones who just wanted to make art.” There was also a social stigma against public housing. “Not every newcomer wanted it known they were living in Westbeth,” Trachtenberg notes, adding that “the artists who showed at uptown galleries were especially self-conscious.” His friend Jack Dowling remembered, “Westbeth was a housing project, it was a place for poor people. They were afraid it would lower their reputations.”

Westbeth has the tenants of an artists loft, the ethos of a co-op, and the landlords of the projects. Its contradictions may stem from the mix of private and public funding, or even Meier’s American adaptation of Le Corbusier’s principles. Literary scholar Carrie Noland, who grew up in Westbeth with artist parents, has argued that “Meier’s attention to radical individualism in the midst of communal living sketched out an embryonic yet never thoroughly elaborated counter-modernity.” It is ironic that, far from being freed from the quotidian concerns of rent and property, Westbeth artists—who were supposed to represent the urban spontaneity that Jane Jacobs advocated for in the West Village—became abnormally invested in the minutiae of mortgages, federal housing appropriations, and planning. Another unresolved question is what united Kaplan’s interests in anti-communism and artists’ housing. Could the idea of putting dozens of artists under one roof have been a way to influence the direction of art or even monitor artists during one of the country’s most radical eras?

The twenty-first century has brought its share of changes to Westbeth. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy carried tons of water from the Hudson into the complex, flooding dozens of artists’ basement studios. “Only a few people in Westbeth seemed to have understood that the building was at risk and moved their work out of the basement,” Trachtenberg writes. A $40 million federal grant helped Westbeth replace damaged boilers, plumbing, and electrical panels, but for many artists—like David Seccombe, whose large, wooden sculptures have been exhibited at museums such as the Detroit Institute of Art—irreplaceable creative production was gone. This past October, work began on an $84 million renovation, again funded by a mix of private and public sources.

Two blocks over from Westbeth stands a series of glass oblongs designed by Meier, who left his namesake firm in 2021 following sexual harassment allegations. In a perfect, green-glass reflection of how the neighborhood has changed from its bohemian roots, residents in the Perry Street towers have included Nicole Kidman and Vincent Gallo. One can easily imagine Timothée Chalamet moving in or his mother hosting walk-throughs; a two-bedroom in one of the buildings is currently listed for $5.65 million. In the context of the changing West Village, Westbeth holds onto something otherwise lost, despite its own internal transformations. While not “the last artists of New York,” as Trachtenberg’s subtitle puts it, Westbethians will turn the lights off on Village bohemia. Meanwhile, the old Westbeth lives on—in the Great Plains, at least. That’s where the artwork-like apartment of Barton Lidice Beneš has been painstakingly reassembled in the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, down to the placement of his opium bed.