The Literary Review

Summer 2006

Samantha Gillison
Growing Up in Westbeth

My parents moved into Westbeth, the artists housing complex in the West Village in 1970, when I was three years old. My very first jumble of memories are all from sitting in a red folding kiddie seat on the back of my father's bicycle, riding through the far West Village through a cityscape so bleak that it is literally impossible to imagine if you visit the same places today. Homeless men and dock workers roamed cobblestone streets that glittered with smashed glass. A distinctive ca-klink ca-klink of spray paint cans being shaken and then a whooshing sound meant that the graffiti writers were at work up on the deserted High Line tracks. The High Line, built up above 10th Avenue in the 1930s, had carried freight trains down the west side of Manhattan until the 1960s when trucking took over the business and the trains stopped running. Although a lot of the High Line had already been torn down by the time we moved in to the building a stretch of the abandoned tracks, rusted out and over-grown, ran through the Washington Street side of Westbeth, adding to the eerie, forgotten, industrial feel of the place.
Further west transvestite prostitutes in feather boas and sparkly shoes lit the darkness underneath the abandoned elevated West Side highway like fireflies. And I knew we were close to my nursery school on Horatio Street when the sweet-sour stink of rotting meat filled my nose as we bicycled past men in blood-splattered white coats hanging cow carcasses up on hooks while fat, cat-sized wharf rats crawled around the sidewalks.
Dreamed up in an era of civic idealism, Westbeth (originally called the National Artists' Center) was unlike anything that came before it. Designed by Richard Meier at the beginning of his career from 1967-9 and opened in 1970, the federally funded complex was and still is not only the largest artists' community in the world but the only one in the United States. While drawing up plans for Westbeth, Meier was inspired by Charles-Edouard Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in the French city of Marseilles. Le Corbusier's Unité is a kind of Platonic ideal of low-income urban living: an extraordinarily stylish complex that combines vertically integrated spaces for living, recreation, working, retail and government services.
With Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in mind Meier converted the 725,000 square foot former Bell Telephone Labs, a series of yellow brick buildings which take up the square block of West, Bank, Washington and Bethune Street into 383 apartments as well as photographic darkrooms, galleries, performance spaces and a dance studio where avant-garde legend Merce Cunningham's company has been ensconced since the 1970s.
Even if you disregarded the eccentric artists who occupied it (which was impossible if they were your parents), the Westbeth that the youthful Meier created was a strange place to live. The whole space has an echt1969 psychedelic flavor. The lobby ceiling is a patchwork of neon pink, orange, and purple squares. The hallways, endlessly long affairs of The Shining-like proportions while great for skateboarding and terrifying games of hide and seek are creepy labyrinths that howl with the winter winds that blow off the Hudson.
When I was old enough to sneak out of the apartment unnoticed I spent days with my friends exploring the countless nooks and crannies and secret hallways in those 725,000 square feet: we crept around the bizarre tugboat-size boilers that sit in the basement painted with leering cartoon faces, and in the summer jumped in the courtyard fountain which sprayed us with excitingly painful water pressure. But even so I never felt that we had discovered even half of Westbeth's secret places. However, it was always those long, long hallways which provoked squeamish reactions from first time Westbeth visitors. Every time a new friend from came over for a play date I always got a version of "doesn't it freak you out to live on these hallways?" But really, the hallways were the least of it.

In the spring as the ice melts there's a wind that blows off the Hudson up Bethune Street that's full of the rich, briny smell of the river. And it's that wet smell, so intense and evocative of my childhood in the far West Village, that seeps through a memory of coming home from school one afternoon to find a neighbor splayed out on the sidewalk with his right leg sticking straight up at a 90 degree angle.
A group of Westbeth residents and security guards had clustered around him. I, morbidly curious and eleven years old, lurked among them, gaping at his grotesquely twisted corpse. I knew this man who had just jumped off the roof longer than I could remember; he lived with his family down the hall from us. He was a German painter with a glass-eye and two beautiful children around my age. It was a surreal scene to have stumbled on and it haunted my dreams for years. As I stood staring at my neighbor, trying to fathom that he was no longer alive, an ambulance from St. Vincent's drove up in silence splashing red shadows on a preternaturally calm crowd. No one cried or screamed even though almost all of them had seen the painter's leap from the rooftop. The only discussion as the ambulance drove away that I remember were murmurings about his two children and their mother who mustn't see his blood on the sidewalk.
Suicide, however sad, didn't shock anyone out on Bethune Street that day. It was a part of life at Westbeth. In 1971, only a year after the building opened, the photographer Diane Arbus famously killed herself in her fourth floor apartment. And the German painter was only the latest in a series of artists to jump off the roof. But whatever high human tragedy shellacked the complex its community behaved the way they did that afternoon, calm for the most part, reflexively protecting their own. And for all its weirdness, filth and rough edges Westbeth and the far West Village it was plunked at the edge of was an Aladdin's Cave of humanity.
When we first moved into the building one of the places my father took me to most often on his bike was Ruth Berk's antique shop at 374 Bleecker Street. Ruth liked to look after me while my parents, who were too poor in those days to hire a baby sitter, did their errands. At the back of her antique store, crammed in between old European dressers, chests, and paintings was a round wood table, a hot plate, kettle, and shelf stocked with tins of Savarin coffee and ginger snaps. Every day in the back of Ruth's store was a rollicking salon, crowded with soigné gay men, many of them distinguished and famous like the African-American gay rights activist Bayard Rustin with his gold rings and elaborately carved wooden walking stick or Andy Warhol under his weird wig. But also around her table were other antique store owners, musicians, dancers, writers and anyone else who wandered in off of Bleecker Street to sit on an uncomfortable Victorian chair and have a chat, a coffee and a piece of the delicious day-old cinnamon babka that Ruth bought at the Hasidic bakery near her house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn before she came to work.
Ruth, who was an elderly, single woman with an acerbic wit and impeccable, self-taught taste in French and British decorative antiquities had the most fabulous earlobes I had ever seen. They were long and soft, stretched out from a life of wearing too-heavy, chic earring. She let me sit on her lap and stroke her earlobes while she held court among "the boys" as she called them. "The boys" adored Ruth who was a kind of surrogate mother to them. Since they knew it would please her these accomplished, ambitious gay men unlikely to have the slightest interest in a small girl doted on me. Broadway dancers, Rodney and Tommy taught me soft shoe routines between a Louis Seize side-table and a pair of Orkney chairs; Albert gave me antique doll house furniture from his legendary toy store (which, of course, children were not allowed in), and my most beloved of "the boys" Norman, a waiter by day, Lute-player by weekend sang for me.
Norman, with his shining bald pate, luxurious, Nietzsche-esque moustache, black leather chaps, harness, and motorcycle boots did not stand out of the crowd in the West Village in those days. But in the back of Ruth's store, he was transformed into a kind of black leather-wearing angel. He would arrive, take his wooden lute out of it's case, gingerly place its enormous round belly against his taut one and play haunting songs of Tudor England for us. My favorite in his repertoire was Greensleeves written, Norman told me, by Henry VIII himself. Norman had a rich, operatic falsetto that seemed to make all of the furniture in 374 Bleecker Street vibrate. And as I sat on Ruth's lap while Norman sang I had my first experiences of the transcendental bliss of live musical performance.
"Oy, Norman," Ruth would say and give him a kiss when he finished singing. "Such a voice. Such a voice."
All of the men I knew from Ruth's store died in the earliest waves of AIDS, when the West Village turned into a waking nightmare of skeletal young men, covered in Kaposi's sarcoma lesions wandering dazed, half-blind along the sidewalks. When I look back now I see that it was the advent of AIDS that erased the West Village of my childhood but at the time, the changes came so slowly, that they were almost unnoticeable. Like the annual paroxysm of exuberant creative idiosyncrasy known as the Village Halloween Parade. All my growing up it had been a locals-only affair that started in Westbeth's outer courtyard. Huge, terrifying papier mache puppets of witches, ghosts, hairy-legged spiders and monsters were operated by silent puppeteers. Legions of men, dressed to the nines swarmed the streets around Westbeth, fanning out East to Washington Square Park; Marie Antoinette was a regular with or without her bleeding neck wound, although Nancy Regan, and the T.W.A.T stewardesses in tight neon satin uniforms, fishnet stockings and moustaches owned the front lines.
Bella Abzug in a huge hat — the real thing — and more than a few, very convincing male impersonators of her — as well as Ed Koch made appearances. But soon the parade's glorious strangeness faded into more of a New Orleans-style carnivale and finally degenerated into the quasi-frat party it is today.
Recently walking with my 8 year old son, Henry, along the beautiful park that has transformed the West Village's water front with its blooming roses, Japanese hyacinth, manicured soccer fields and wholesome joggers and rollerbladers whizzing past us with nary a transvestite prostitute in sight I tried to explain what the Village was like when I was his age. Henry gave me a look of mingled disbelief and boredom.
"Yeah, but you still had the trapeze school, right?" he asked.
"No," I said, trying for dignity. "We did not have the trapeze school."
And when I visited the exhibit at MOMA last September of the elaborate, inventive designs to turn the old High Line into an exquisite public promenade that will run from Gansevoort up to 14th street, (with work set to begin in 2006) I had the same sensation as I do walking along the new riverfront park. What a beautiful place it will be, I thought examining the architectural drawings and computer renderings, marveling at the money it will cost and the creativity and vision that went into its planning. I can't wait to take Henry there to see it. But I felt no tug of emotion for the place, no sense that this was my home, where I grew up. Because the West Village of the 1970s and early 80s has not been transformed, it has disappeared. There is something new in it's place along with the multi-million dollar brownstone renovations: a wildly prosperous, aggressive but totally new spirit hangs over it now. And with it's Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs boutiques, Fresh soap store and Magnolia Bakery it has been accepted by mainstream America in a way that it's old freaky self never could have imagined.
Yet, just when I thought I had worked through all 5 of the Kubler Ross stages of grief for the death of the West Village of my childhood, I took Henry for another walk along the river one evening after we had dinner with my father, who still lives in Westbeth. The wind was blowing off of the Hudson and the river's waves were purple from the sunset and I swear I could hear Norman's beautiful voice, singing Greensleeves.