Click to enlarge

Tuesday March 18, 2025 at 7pm
Westbeth Comunity Room
155 Bank St
New York, NY 10014

BOOK DESCRIPTION
An intimate history of Westbeth, told through the stories of nine of its artist residents. The Twilight of Bohemia also explores the changing notions of what it means to be a successful artist and the heartbreaking difficulty of surviving as one at our present cultural moment.

REVIEW EXCERPTS
“Who would have thought that a book about artist housing in Lower Manhattan would be impossible to put down? The force and beauty and clarity of Peter Trachtenberg’s writing is what makes The Twilight of Bohemia a page-turner about so much more than the characters we meet and the lost world of New York City that it so vividly evokes.”
— Francine Prose, Vixen

“Reading The Twilight of Bohemia, I had the feeling that its subject—a complex of buildings—had been condensed into book form through some Borgesian literary-alchemical process. This work is elegiac, intimate, and wry. Trachtenberg tells interlacing tales of an architectural entity, artists who have lived as neighbors for fifty years, an art world that now only exists in New York City’s rear-view mirror, and a friendship that began in youth and ended with suicide in Westbeth. But the book is also a true historical document, detailed and precise. And completely crucial.” – Nelly Reifler, Elect H. Mouse State Judge

“Beautiful! How often have you read a great book and thought, ‘Why can’t I live there? Why can’t I live that story?’ . . . Trachtenberg has artfully, tenderly, and wisely recreated New York City’s legendary Westbeth artists’ community through the stories of dozens of artists who lived there, himself included. The result is a messy tale of love and loss anchored in the equally messy act of creation. . . . It is a story that left this reader hungering for more.”
— Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art

BIO
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of the memoir 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning, and Another Insane Devotion, a 2012 New York Times Editors’ Choice. His honors include Whit­ing and Guggenheim Fellowships and the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction. He is a professor emeritus in the Writing Program of the University of Pittsburgh. He has been connected to Westbeth since the 1970s and lived in the building from 1995 to 2006.