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Phone Calls and Curtain Calls: Westbeth
Formerly the Bell Telephone Laboratories Complex, the Westbeth Arts Complex is a group of buildings that takes up an entire city block. Westbeth is significant not only as the former home to one of the world’s most prestigious telecommunications research organizations but also as the first and largest publicly- and privately-funded artists’ housing project in the United States. Westbeth is a pioneer of large-scale industrial rehabilitation and adaptive reuse.
Bell Telephone Laboratories Complex
The oldest structure in the complex is 445-453 West Street, formerly Hook’s Steam-powered Factory Building. It was built circa 1860 in the vernacular Italianate style and is one of the few extant nineteenth-century industrial buildings left along the Hudson River waterfront. The structure housed a number of manufacturing companies until 1927 when the property, including 445-465 West Street and three other non-extant structures, was leased by Bell Telephone Laboratories.
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Bell Telephone Laboratories Complex
Beginning in 1896, the Western Electric Company of Illinois began to buy parcels of land in the Far West Village at West Street. The company built an office and factory building for telephone-related equipment at 455-465 West Street, 149 Bank Street, and 734-742 Washington Street. Built between 1896 and 1903, it was designed by Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz in a restrained neo-Classical style and clad in buff-colored brick and terracotta.
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Bell Telephone Laboratories Complex
By 1913 the factory building no longer served as a manufacturing plant but rather as the headquarters of Western Electric’s Engineering Department. In 1925, it became Bell Telephone Laboratories for research and development for both the American Telegraph & Telephone Company (AT\&T) and Western Electric Company following the launch of Bell Labs, a joint venture by both companies.
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Bell Telephone Laboratories Complex
Following Bell Labs' exit from the complex, Roger L. Stevens, first chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, conceived of the complex as a pilot project of subsidized, affordable studio living quarters for artists. This was substantially supported and inaugurated by the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the complex was converted into Westbeth Artists’ Housing in 1968-70. This was the first large-scale adaptive reuse of an industrial building for residential purposes and one of the first residential developments along the Greenwich Village waterfront. It was designed by the architect Richard Meier and was his first major work.
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Bell Telephone Laboratories Complex
The complex features 383 residential and work studio units, as well as gallery, performance and commercial spaces and a park. Since its transformation to artists’ housing, Diane Arbus, Merce Cunningham, Moses Gunn, Hans Haacke, and Gil Evans, among countless other artists, lived or worked at Westbeth. Westbeth remains an affordable housing complex for more than 350 working artists, providing live/workspaces, studios, and galleries.
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