Peter Trachtenberg’s The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York (Black Sparrow, Apr.) offers a glimpse inside America's first publicly funded artists’ housing, which opened in the West Village in 1970. Tenants have included jazz musician Gil Evans, photographer Diane Arbus, and actors Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman. Trachtenberg, who lived in the building for 11 years, discusses how he relied on personal recollections, research, and interviews to bring it to life.
When did you start conceiving this book?
It grew out of a long essay about the suicide of my friend Gay Milius. The longer I worked on the essay, the more I worried about what it meant, apart from the death of one unhappy human being. If Gay’s death was to have a larger meaning, it derived from his context: the context of the building where he lived and worked for 25 years, and where he returned to die in 2006. Also the context of art. I think Gay staked his life on art, and when the gamble didn’t pay off, his only way out was to kill himself. The only people who could fully understand that gamble were the artists who were his neighbors, so I had to write about them and the building they lived in. I’d lived there, too, but had never really paid attention to it, being there illegally and under Gay’s paranoid instructions not to get friendly with any of the residents. The Twilight of Bohemia is my attempt to finally pay attention to what I should have seen before.
What challenges or reservations, if any, did you have when writing about Gay’s and your friendship?
Gay was a difficult personality: brilliant, kind, funny, with a protean, boundaryless imagination, but also cranky, mercurial, and self-destructive. Writing about him meant being honest about the barbs of his personality while capturing what made him so loveable. At the same time, I was thinking about him as a literary character. These two kinds of portrayal can be hard to reconcile. It’s like juggling, but juggling something that may break if you drop it, or maybe crack your skull.
As opposed to writing a straightforward memoir, why did you choose to include reportage and interviews with other tenants from Westbeth?
Having written one memoir, and another book that’s an extended personal essay, I feel I’ve exhausted myself as an area of inquiry. A memoirist may be able to write about a community if they’re one of its members, but I was never a member of the Westbeth community. By default, the only way I could write about my former neighbors was as a journalist and historian, approaching them from a point of view of absolute ignorance, and then trying to lessen that distance.
You spotlight people who’ve made art a central part of their lives but might never achieve wide recognition. How did you choose who to write about?
Some of my choices were dictated by Covid-19. My original plan was to come into the city a few times a week from the Hudson Valley and interview people on site, but because so many tenants were elderly, Westbeth’s lockdown was especially strict. I had to conduct interviews on the phone or by Zoom, a technology that not all the residents were comfortable with, but I had introductions to Jack Dowling and Edward Field, and they in turn introduced me to some of their neighbors, and I focused on those whose personalities or stories most excited me.
And then there were a few people I knew I had to write about, starting with Black-Eyed Susan, the prima donna of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater. I also wanted to interview Lorraine O’Grady, and she initially agreed to meet, but after her 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, people saw the genius that she’d been exercising for 50 years, and she was in such demand from researchers and curators and doctoral students that we could never set up a date.
One intriguing thread in the book involves people raising children at Westbeth—including, at one point, the actor Vin Diesel as a boy. Why did you see this as an important aspect?
It’d be easy to misrepresent Westbeth as a senior center for bohemians—or maybe a future senior center for bohemians. But from the very beginning, a number of the residents were parents with young children. The most striking early photos of the building have kids in them: kids watching one of Ralph Lee’s puppet shows in the courtyard; kids joining their parents at an antiwar demonstration. As Jenny Lombard, who grew up in the building, told me, the long hallways were perfect for playing tag and, starting in the ’80s, for skateboarding. Today, Westbeth is one of the few places in Manhattan where people who aren’t wealthy can afford to raise children. To me, that makes it particularly precious, a redoubt for New York’s vanishing middle class.
With a majority of tenants older than 60, and rents in Manhattan continuing to escalate, what’s the current state of Westbeth? What might you see happening in the future?
When I gave a reading there on March 18, the only pushback I got concerned what some people considered an inadequate emphasis on the young artists who’ve moved into the building with their families. It’s those artists who will keep the building alive. I know Westbeth’s finances are in order, and its tax abatements shield it from one of the factors that make housing in the city so impossibly expensive. If good management and the good will and resilience of its residents are enough to keep a community alive, I believe Westbeth will prevail. But we now have a regime that appears to be intent on smashing all the systems that benefited ordinary, non-wealthy Americans, and I can’t swear that it won’t find a way to smash a system like Westbeth. What’s stripping four or five hundred people of their housing when you’re already doing that to four or five million?
