The “Loft Cause” or “Bohemia Gone Bourgeois?”

Abstract

The Westbeth Arts Center in New York’s Greenwich Village was one of the first large-scale institutionally sponsored conversions of nineteenth-century factories into residential lofts for artists. A privately and publicly financed project to provide housing for low-income artists, Westbeth stood apart from individual-artist-led loft conversion in SoHo in both its scope and its philanthropic goals of democratizing the arts in postwar America. Westbeth never met its sponsors’ hopes that it would serve as a model for similar nonprofit artist residences in cities throughout the nation, but it did prove to private real estate developers that residential lofts had cultural value in postindustrial cities. Ultimately, Westbeth represented a transitional moment in postwar urban development between publicly funded urban renewal and private real estate development.