On May 19, 1970, a project like no other ever imagined or realized before opened its doors on the corner of West and Bethune Streets. Westbeth (a portmanteau of those street names) was the first large scale adaptive reuse of an industrial building for residential purposes, and the first subsidized housing for artists in the […]
American architect Richard Meier was born on this day in 1934. Over the course of his nearly sixty-year career Meier has designed countless buildings all over the world and received numerous prizes including the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1984, the AIA Gold Medal in 1997 and the Architizer Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Arguably best […]
Seen a movie lately? If so, you have the West Village’s Bell Laboratories (now known as Westbeth) to thank for all the dialogue, music and sound effects that you heard. On this date in 1926, the revolutionary technology responsible for what were then known as “talkies” — or the addition of soundtracks to motion pictures […]
On October 25, 2011, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted unanimously to landmark Westbeth, following through on a promise made seven years earlier to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) and other community groups working to extend landmark protections in the Far West Village. In 2009, GVSHP’s nomination of Westbeth was accepted […]
On August 7th, 1967, the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the newly-constituted National Endowment for the Arts announced plans for a project that would help transform Greenwich Village, New York, housing for artists, industrial buildings, and older industrial cities across the world. The project was the conversion of the disused former Bell Telephone Labs on the […]
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) just voted unanimously to landmark Westbeth, following through on a promise made seven years ago to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) and other community groups working to extend landmark protections in the Far West Village.
