Inside New York’s Last Remaining Artists’ Housing

Edith Stephen, 98, a dancer, choreographer, and documentary filmmaker, moved into the complex the year that it opened, when she was 50 years old. Her 2010 film Split/Scream, A Saga of Westbeth Artist Housing turned the lens on Westbeth. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

“It’s like a hive in here,” Elizabeth Gregory-Gruen said of Westbeth, a theme that recurs in the radiating fire escapes in the building’s interior courtyard. They don’t lead to the ground—in case of fire, residents are meant to crawl to a neighbor’s incombustible, concrete apartment. Photo by Frankie Alduino.
Westbeth makes it clear that it’s valuable to support artists, whether or not they achieve wealth and fame.

Jack Dowling entered Westbeth in 1970 as an abstract painter, but almost immediately turned to a career in writing. These days, he has plans to finally complete his last painting, which has remained unfinished since the 1960s. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

Edith Stephen’s first Westbeth application was rejected; as a university dance teacher, she made too much money to qualify. She was later admitted while unemployed. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

Architect Richard Meier’s blueprint of the second floor on the coffee table in Westbeth Artists Residents Council president Roger Braimon’s apartment in the complex. Photo by Frankie Alduino.
Jack Dowling was nearly 40, broke, and essentially homeless when the Department of Cultural Affairs told him about Westbeth in 1970.

Theater artist Ralph Lee, 83, loves spending time in his studio located in the apartment he moved into with his wife and three children in 1970. He curates a rotating array of his fantastical puppets in an unused guard booth in the Westbeth courtyard. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

The work table in Ralph Lee’s home studio is the origin of many of the puppets featured in the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. The beloved annual event has attracted over 2 million spectators since Lee founded it at Westbeth in 1974. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

As the longest-serving visual arts director on the Westbeth Artists Residents Council, Jack Dowling, 87, is acutely aware of tenants’ broad spectrum of creativity. “You could come in here and find just about every school of art being produced by somebody,” he said. Photo by Frankie Alduino.
When John Lennon visited his personal photographer’s Westbeth apartment, he said “Man, you’ve got some weird neighbors!”

For Jonathan Bauch, “Westbeth was a savior. To afford a studio, I would have had to work full-time.” At 78, he has the freedom to work on his steel sculptures five days a week in a studio in the building that he shares with another resident. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

At 92 years old, Gloria Miguel, a Kuna/Rappahannock elder, continues to perform with Spiderwoman Theater. The company, which she founded with her sisters in the mid-1970s, produces plays about women’s and indigenous issues. Photo by Frankie Alduino.
As a society, we have an urgent, moral obligation to address how artists can live safely and thrive creatively.

As the founder of the percussion ensemble Women of the Calabash, Madeleine Yayodele Nelson performed for eminent world leaders, including Barack Obama, in a quest to popularize music from Africa and the African diaspora. Nelson passed away last September at age 69; she joined Westbeth in 1982. Photo by Frankie Alduino.
As the city’s real estate prices soared in the 1980s and ’90s, artists clung to their Westbeth apartments ever more tightly.

Octogenarian actress-turned-writer Carol Hebald’s extensive book collection bounds her living room, which is also her office. She’s lived at Westbeth since 1991, and has published a memoir, a novella collection, a novel, and four books of poetry. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

Rock photographer Bob Gruen’s famous 1974 portrait of John Lennon overlooks an apartment crammed with 50 years’ worth of negatives—an archive his wife, Elizabeth Gregory-Gruen, is painstakingly working to organize. Photo by Frankie Alduino.

Latvian dancer and choreographer Vija Vetra, who will turn 96 on February 6th, stands in her front entry hall, surrounded by her artwork and posters from past performances. Vetra continues to conduct yoga and dance classes from her Westbeth studio. Photo by Frankie Alduino.
“No matter how old they are, everybody in this building is creative right up to the end. People are still working the day before they die.”
Header image: Known as the “Poet of Bleecker Street,” Ilsa Gilbert, 85, is the founder and director of the PEN Women’s Literary Workshop. She moved to Westbeth in 2002, after spending eight years on the waitlist. Photo by Frankie Alduino.