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

by Peter Trachtenberg

Overview

An intimate history of America’s first publicly funded artists’ housing project and its residents that casts light on the precarious place of art-makers in a changing New York.

Westbeth Artists Housing was founded in 1970 to provide affordable housing for artists and their families. It occupies a full city block in what back then was one of New York’s less desirable neighborhoods, the desolate far-West Village. Over the next fifty years, the building complex served as a Great Society for bohemians, home at any one time to more than three hundred and eighty creators, who included the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik, jazz great Gil Evans, and the photographer Diane Arbus, who took her life in her apartment in 1971, barely a year after she’d moved in.

To its tenants Westbeth offered the possibility of a middle-class life at affordable rents that freed them to walk along the cliff-edge of their art. Barton Lidicé Beneš filled unlikely vessels (a water-gun, a squirting flower) with his HIV-positive blood in a series called “Lethal Weapons.” The actor Black-Eyed Susan played two dozen roles—including the empress of China and the queen of Saturn— in the legendary Ridiculous Theatrical Company. After her basement studio was flooded during Superstorm Sandy, Karen Santry dove into the noxious water in rented scuba gear to check the condition of her paintings. With the passing of time, Westbeth’s artists watched their neighborhood gentrify and rebrand as the glitzy Meatpacking District, where the average apartment rents for more than $6000 a month. And while some of those artists achieved fame, obscurity drove others to bitterness and despair. The Twilight of Bohemia frames its story with that of the life and tragic death of Gay Milius, a gifted and flamboyantly eccentric painter, flea-market picker, and novelist who moved into the building in 1970 and took his life there in 2006.

Sociologists describe Westbeth as a Naturally-Occurring Retirement Community, or NORC; today, a majority of its residents are over 60. But is Westbeth just an arty senior center holding out against the ruthless market forces of late-capitalist New York? Is artmaking a relic of a past way of life or a good that merits our society’s continuing support? The Twilight of Bohemia explores the changing notions of what it means to be a successful artist and the heartbreaking difficulty of surviving as one at our present cultural moment. It’s a book for anyone who loves brilliantly written stories of passion, idealism, ambition and community, for any reader interested in urban social history or the history of art, and for all who still believe in the old bohemian ethos: of living for art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574232516
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	03/18/2025
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Trachtenberg was born and grew up in New York City and began spending time in Westbeth in the late 1970s. He lived there (illegally) from 1995 to 2006. He is the author of three earlier books of nonfiction and the recipient of awards that include Whiting and Guggenheim Fellowships and a Phi Beta Kappa award.

Editorial Reviews

Who would have thought that a book about artist housing in Lower Manhattan would be impossible to put down? The force and beauty and clarity of Peter Tractenberg’s writing is what makes The Twilight of Bohemia a page-turner about so much more than the characters we meet and the lost world of New York City that it so vividly evokes.”
—Francine Prose, author of 1974

“With tenderness and mischievous humor, The Twilight of Bohemia spins through a carousel of the grimy, effulgent high notes and heartbreaks of New York City’s glorious weirdos. This account of the utopian promise and indignities of the country’s first publicly funded artist housing project, Westbeth, is a love letter: to trying to strike it big, to the grit of getting by, to the pitfalls of soaring imagination, and to friendship. Trachtenberg’s deft hand tallies the tragic dimensions of extraordinary dreams under ordinary capitalism.”
—Tracy O’Neill, author of Woman of Interest

“This fascinating recovery of a time and place has been magnificently researched and written with verve, wit and compassion. It represents a standard for how urban history should be done. Westbeth's history is conveyed frankly, both its promise and its stumbles along the way.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront

“The Twilight of Bohemia is freaking fantastic. I’m a visual artist and I think and see in painting terms, so to me, the book has a deep accomplished chiaroscuro, containing all the elements of Westbeth’s history along with the entire art world in the seventies, balanced with the heartbreak of Gay Butch Milius holding the whole composition together, resulting in a very fine portrait.”
—Edith Vonnegut, painter and illustrator

“Peter Trachtenberg has, with sharpest eye and keenest empathy, retrieved a piece of a lost time. His Twilight of Bohemia captures Westbeth—the 70s-era dream of an artists’ utopia on the Lower West Side. He was there and he brings the lens in close on his fellow artists. Their lives are aspiring, hardscrabble, and sometimes—as with Diane Arbus—tragic. The stories light up a fragile and self-enclosed world. History survives in such acts of attentive witness—would that all our lives be one day told with such care.”
—Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing

Praise for Peter Trachtenberg

“Trachtenberg is an extraordinarily perceptive observer.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Keen perception and measured passion....lyrical and poignant, penetrating and challenging.”
—Charlotte Observer

“The artistry and humor of his writing, the pain of his mercilessly self-punishing insights, the relentlessness of his guilty misanthropy....all give Trachtenberg a solid claim to being a genuine American Dostoevsky.”
—The Washington Post

From the Publisher