Manhattan’s one-of-a-kind artists’ sanctuary thrives on low rents and lofty ideals

In a city as squeezed for affordable living space as New York, Westbeth Artists Housing is practically utopic.

The rent-stabilized complex in the West Village, a Bell Laboratories facility turned into hundreds of apartments, celebrates its 50th birthday this month.

Many of the community’s original tenants remain, and with rents for a live-work studio in the building maxing at about $1,200 per month — $1,900 less than the median rent for a studio in the neighborhood, according to StreetEasy — who could blame them?

But residents of Westbeth have found more than cut-rate rents among the 383 lofts designed by a young Richard Meier. Their Hudson River-facing community is a stronghold of creative output and unyielding spirit in a neighborhood that’s now at odds, at least financially, with the reality of being a working artist in New York.

Coronavirus makes that no easier. The mail room, a hotspot for brainstorms and building gossip, is unusually quiet these days. And the beloved gallery events that show off and inspire community work are now online, at least temporarily, among a slew of other health and safety precautions. But Westbeth has weathered dicey times before.

When the full-block complex at West and Bethune streets opened as the residential artists enclave on May 19, 1970, the West Village was not yet full of pristine townhouses and ritzy boutiques. It was a warren of warehouses and industrial structures, prime turf for National Endowment of the Arts Chairman Roger L. Stevens’s initiative to find a replicable model for subsidized live-work space for artists in cities.

At the time of its opening, Westbeth was “the newest and largest artist’s housing facility in the world, and the only one of its kind in the United States,” per architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Among its famous occupants: photographer Diane Arbus, actor Vin Diesel, Robert De Niro’s Sr. and jazz musician Gil Evans. Puppeteer Ralph Lee’s annual march with Westbeth’s children led to the now-famous Greenwich Village Halloween parade.

Fine artists of all stripes must show work and also earn less than about $70,000/year to apply — and even then, they can spend upwards of a decade on the waiting list.