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

An intimate history of America's first publicly funded artists' housing project and its residents, and the precarious place of art-makers in a changing New York City. 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 Lidice Bene 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 dozens of roles in the legendary Ridiculous Theater 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 median price for real estate is now near $4 million and thrift shops have given way to designer boutiques. And while some of them 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 committed suicide 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, a tiny island of nonconformist characters marooned in the midst of a late-stage capitalist sea? Is artmaking a specter of a past way of life or a good that merits our society's continuing support-and if it is, what larger purpose might it serve? The Twilight of Bohemia explores the changing notions of what it means to be a successful artist and the heartbreaking difficulty of surviving in the 21st century as one. It's a book for anyone who loves brilliantly written, lyrical stories of passion, idealism, ambition and community, for any reader interested in urban social history or the history of art, and for those who still believe in the old bohemian ethos: of living for art.