Tod Williams and the Genesis of Westbeth Artists Housing
Imagine that at a dinner party, you turn to the person to your right, ask him about his background in the city, and he leads with this: He moved to New York during the late ‘60s with a freshly minted degree in architecture. At the time, many in the profession shared a faith in the capacity of good design to address social problems, and the city, not yet mired in political unrest, was still receptive to this sort of ambition. He found a job right off the bat on the strength of a student project on Le Corbusier, working for a future starchitect on a large-scale, pioneering adaptive reuse project that aimed to turn a former industrial complex into an affordable artist live/work community. In many ways, this project was an experiment. Industrial-loft-living wasn’t yet a thing. And no one lived in this neighborhood. Nonetheless, the project came to pass, your dining neighbor moved in, and he got a ringside seat to the early years of this experiment.
This introduction would raise questions. It would provide enough conversational fodder to last you well past dessert. You might ask about: the thinking behind the project, life in the Village at the time, the transformation of the industrial waterfront, life among artists, architecture practice back then, what worked and what didn’t, and so forth. The answers to those questions would constitute a sort of oral history. And that, in effect, is how we produce our oral histories, which offer a window into life in the neighborhood at a different time and through the eyes of individuals who played a significant role in shaping it. The hypothetical interlocutor above is none other than architect Tod Williams. And his oral history tells the story of the creation and early years of Westbeth Artists Housing, the largest artist community in the world.
These days, Tod Williams is well known for his work in partnership with Billie Tsien on noteworthy projects like the Barnes Foundation and the gratuitously demolished American Folk Art Museum. In the story Williams tells us, however, he is still in his early 20s and starting his career. As a student, he had written a thesis on utopian housing communities, focusing specifically on Le Corbusier’s influential housing proposals and projects, most notably the influential Unité d’Habitation.
In the summer of 1967, preparation met opportunity. A former teacher, then-little-known architect and designer Michael Graves, suggested that he reach out to another former teacher, then-also-little-known Richard Meier, about a commission for a large-scale artist housing project that Meier’s office had just received. Williams did as he was told, showed up with a few drawings from his Le Corbusier thesis, and was hired on the spot. Thus began his work on the Westbeth Artists Housing project.
The Westbeth project was as improbable as it was unprecedented. It would be the first large-scale adaptive reuse of an industrial building for residential purposes, as well as the first subsidized housing for artists in the country (see architect report here).
The site was located in a deindustrializing but still primarily industrial part of the Village, the corner of West and Bethune Streets (a portmanteau of those names gave the project its name). At the time, the waterfront at the time still contained working piers, a crumbling elevated highway still brought constant traffic by the site, and train tracks (a portion of what is now called the High Line) went through the building.
On top of that, people just didn’t live in this area. In fact, the idea of living in an industrial district held no cool factor or even remote appeal back then. Williams recalls that the population density west of Washington was approximately six people per acre. In short, the Westbeth project aimed to create an artist residential community and artistic scene in a decrepit industrial structure located in an uninhabited corner of the city still devoted to industrial uses. It seems entirely implausible. But it was the late 60s, New York had not yet plunged into a spiral of crisis and despair, and far-fetched plans like these still seemed within reach.
Westbeth arose from joint efforts by the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the newly-formed National Endowment of the Arts (more here). Williams did not learn much about the origins and working of that partnership as a junior member of the Meier’s architecture team. He did, however, grapple directly with the design challenges associated with this massive, former Bell Telephone Labs complex suitable for artist living and work space. This may seem like routine exercise from today’s vantage point; but it had few precedents to draw from back then. Williams explains that his team’s task involved not just rendering the structure habitable, but also fostering a sustainable artist community. Upon completion of the project, he soon learned lessons about the distance between plan and reality. And he learned them from the perspective of both an architect and a resident.
Williams was among the first residents at Westbeth. During his few years there, he got to experience first-hand his own team’s design successes and miscalculations. It turns out, for instance, that if you house 383 artists under one roof, pretty soon many of them will start building things with scrap from the street and making common spaces look like psychedelic shanty-towns. It also turns out that, however idealistic your project, you need strict management mechanisms in place to deal with, say, a tenant who, for months on end, keeps a horse on his floor. And just to name a third important lesson, the ability to cross-subsidize residential space and building maintenance with commercial rents depend on commercial customers. And those are hard to come by when just about no one lives in the area.
Williams’ account concludes with reflections on the legacy of Westbeth, touching both on aspirations never realized and on the project’s enduring impacts. You can read Williams’ oral history in its entirety here. His oral history, however, is just only one of the many oral histories that we conducted in connection to this fascinating project. You can find the others here. You can also check out the following additional resources to further explore the history, architecture, and cultural life of Westbeth.
- Village Preservation’s Westbeth State and National Register of Historic Places Nomination and Listing
- Announcement of and information on Westbeth landmarking and landmark designation report
- Village Preservation’s Westbeth Historic Plaque Unveiling
- National Register of Historic Places listing of Westbeth’s Bell Telephone History
- Village Preservation Westbeth News
- Village Preservation Westbeth Blog Posts
- Recap of, Information about , and pictures of Village Preservation and Westbeth’s Artist Loft Tour