STATE OF THE ART
Westbeth Artists Housing turns 50 this week. Meet the lucky residents, who enjoy enviably cheap rents and a tight-knit community
IN a city as squeezed for affordable living space as New York, Westbeth Artists Housing is practically utopic. The rent-stabilized complex in the West Village, a Bell Laboratories facility turned into hundreds of apartments, celebrates its 50th birthday this month. Many of the community’s original tenants remain, and with rents for a live-work studio in the building maxing at about $1,200 per month — $1,900 less than the median rent for a studio in the neighborhood, according to StreetEasy — who could blame them?
But residents of Westbeth have found more than cut-rate rents among the 383 lofts designed by a young Richard Meier. Their Hudson
River-facing community is a stronghold of creative output and unyielding spirit in a neighborhood that’s now at odds, at least financially, with the reality of being a working artist in New York.
Coronavirus makes that no easier. The mail room, a hotspot for brainstorms and building gossip, is unusually quiet these days. And the beloved gallery events that show off and inspire community work are now online, at least temporarily, among a slew of other health and safety precautions. But Westbeth has weathered dicey times before.
When the full-block complex at West and Bethune streets opened as the residential artists enclave on May 19, 1970, the West Village was not yet full of pristine townhouses and ritzy boutiques. It was a warren of warehouses and industrial structures, prime turf for National Endowment of the Arts Chairman Roger L. Stevens’s initiative to find a replicable model for subsidized live-work space for artists in cities.
At the time of its opening, Westbeth was “the newest and largest artist’s housing facility in the world, and the only one of its kind in the United States,” per critic Ada Louise Huxtable.
Fine artists of all stripes must show work and also earn less than about $70,000/year to apply
— and even then, they can spend upwards of a decade on the waiting list.
Painter Karen Santry moved into Westbeth in 1990, 20 years after first putting in an application, and like many others bided her time in a starter studio before scoring her current apartment. Santry has occupied the 550square-foot studio with 14-foot ceilings and a glittering view over uptown for 28 years.
The 71-year-old currently pays $1,154 per month in rent including heat, hot water and electricity, as well as a few eccentricities like the gentle thrum of the Martha Graham Dance Company
practicing in its studio overhead.
Santry also maintains one of the prized additional studio spaces available to tenants, a 750square-foot studio overlooking the Hudson River for which she pays $550 a month plus insurance, a necessary measure after storm surge from Hurricane Sandy flooded Santry’s basement studio and ruined the costly supplies and lifetime of work of many others.
It wasn’t always so idyllic. Pele Bauch, 46, grew up in Westbeth and recalls the West Village’s gritty days. “It was so unsafe in the 1970s that tenants got together and patrolled the halls with baseball bats,” Bauch says. But still, her childhood there nurtured her creative side and even allowed for a little fun — like how she and a gaggle of kid neighbors would spend afternoons playing “ding-dong ditch” in the building’s labyrinthine halls.
Bauch, a choreographer, moved back into Westbeth with her husband and two young children two years ago — after a decade on the waiting list.
The queue to live in the building is so long that, until 2019, it had remained closed to new applicants since 2007. And last year, applications were only accepted for a month before closing early.
The allure? A built-in community of artist neighbors, of course, but rents in the building are staggeringly low. Think around $1,000 for a studio, $1,300 for a one-bedroom, and $2,000 for a two-bedroom, according to the 2019 application.
Nabbing a stabilized apartment at Westbeth requires wannabe residents to prove they’re a practicing fine artist, and that their income doesn’t exceed a salary cap based on a percentage of the area median income. In 2019, that cap was $69,445 for a single applicant and went up from there depending on household size.
“The idea of moving back into Westbeth felt like moving back into my parents’ house. At first, I didn’t want to,” Bauch says. But given the financial reality of being a working artist in the city, Bauch relented. She lives in a two-bedroom duplex, and uses the apartment’s living room as a practice area. “Moving back into Westbeth has meant being able to have a workspace for me, and that isn’t something I ever thought I’d be able to have.”
Nowadays, it feels to Bauch like Westbeth’s mission is at odds with the reality of its surroundings. “It’s wonderful to live in an intentional community of artists, but it’s also difficult to live in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country,” Bauch says, citing how many octogenarian tenants trek to Union Square to shop for less pricey groceries than what’s available nearby.
Still, Westbeth’s “more than reasonable” rents allow artists to hone their crafts late into their lives, says longtime building resident Jack Dowling. “It’s the only way to be an artist and continue living in New York,” says the 88year-old writer, painter and former director of Westbeth’s on-site gallery.
Dowling currently lives in a studio with 14-foot ceilings and views onto a landmarked swath of the West Village — for which, he slyly concedes, he does pay a tad more than the $79 a month he tendered in 1971. But it’s still low enough to allow him to focus on his work. “If there wasn’t Westbeth,
we’d have nowhere to go,” Dowling says of his fellow elders.
Thanks to the coronavirus lockdown, Dowling does, in fact, have nowhere to go. But he’s being productive. “Despite my age,” he adds, “I’m writing every day.”
Roger Braimon, a resident since 2009 and president of the Westbeth Artists Residents Council, says he’s considered a young’un in the building at age 52. “One of the benefits of having affordable housing is the longevity of the artists,” says Braimon, a visual artist who first applied for housing in 1994. “You’re able to create a lot longer than you would if you weren’t subsidized.”
Braimon lives in the studio directly under Santry’s, and works near the apartment’s two large windows. He talks about the complex with gusto.
“I always think that I got here a little too late, because some of the stories the original tenants tell are just incredible,” Braimon says, recalling his neighbor’s account of watching subversive photographer Diane Arbus being taken out of the building after her death in 1971.
But the Westbeth community is as active as ever — even during a pandemic — with events like a livestreamed flute concert by Louna Dekker-Vargas and a virtual show of Gayle Kirschenbaum’s photos.
Even in times of uncertainty, the spirit at Westbeth is alive and well. “Although the neighborhood’s changed, Westbeth hasn’t,” says Dowling. “There’s always something happening here. There’s always something to keep you going. This isn’t a place where people sit back and wait. This is a place where people move forward.”