About the Book:
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 The Twilight of Bohemia
Author Bios:
Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals , and two novels, All Will Be Revealed , and All the Money in the World . His work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other places, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at Hawthornden Brooklyn.Peter Trachtenberg is the author of The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York (Godine/Black Sparrow, 2025), the memoir 7 Tattoos , The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning, and Another Insane Devotion . His essays, reporting, and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York Magazine, The New York Times Travel Magazine, A Public Space, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Guernica, and his commentaries broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He’s been awarded Whiting and Guggenheim fellowships, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, along with residencies at Yaddo and the Bellagio Center. He’s an Associate Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
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