The Decline of the West

The Westbethians will turn the lights off on Village bohemia.

Jul 29, 2025
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  • The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York by Peter Trachtenberg. Black Sparrow Press, 344 pp., $30.

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 …

Michael Casper is the coauthor, with Nathaniel Deutsch, of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (Yale University Press).

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