The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York

The first subsidized housing colony for artists in the United States, the Westbeth Artists Housing and Center for the Arts is a rent-controlled, tenant-governed housing and commercial complex in New York City’s West Village. Using seed money from the National Endowment of the Arts in the late 1960s, an inspired collective of bohemians renovated an abandoned Bell Laboratories building, creating 384 live/work and performance spaces out of the mess, and finally opening the doors in 1970. Rents have always been extremely low (15 to 25 percent of market rate); there’s a 12-year waiting list; and the majority of the tenants have lived there for over 30 years. Although the list of famous and influential residents is long (poet Muriel Rukeyser, actors Moses Gunn and Vin Diesel, musician Gil Evans), Trachtenberg (emeritus, English, Univ. of Pittsburgh; The Book of Calamities) dives into the building’s amazing history more anecdotally, focusing on a handful of relatively unknown longtime residents and their relationships with one another, their art, their world, and their lives.