I can’t get anything done. I can’t write. I can’t take a Zoom meeting. I can’t even make a phone call. I can’t stretch out on the couch and take a nap. I can’t step out of my bathroom naked. I can’t relax. All I can do is escape from my apartment while they drill on the walls outside my windows. I’m living in a construction site. It’s called Westbeth Artists Housing.
Westbeth, which occupies a city block, from Bethune Street south along the West Side Highway, is undergoing a massive $85 million renovation of its century-old buildings. Upgrades are necessary for the preservation of the complex, which architect Richard Meier reconceived from an industrial campus to an artists’ community opening in 1970. I’ve called Westbeth my home since 1997.
The current project started in 2025 and is slated to end in 2028. As the first major renovation since Westbeth came to be, it requires work that is complicated and costly, more so due to the 384-unit structure’s landmark status. Funding is coming from new mortgages and a mix of public and private sources, including grants.
The project underway includes replacing 684 wood framed windows, fixing leaky roofs, repairing the historic façade with some brick and terra cotta replacement, abating asbestos, modernizing the lobby, and renovating 32 empty apartments. Management and contractors relentlessly plow toward deadlines despite massive disruption to tenants’ everyday lives.
I work from home and used to start my day quietly with coffee and meditation and then writing or editing. One day in April started with workers drilling outside and working in the apartment next-door. I was bombarded by loud noises. I was going crazy and I couldn’t wait go to the senior center to teach my memoir class. But it was hard to think. Had I packed everything? Did I take my blood pressure medication? As I got dressed, I blasted rock music to drown out the noise. Even Led Zeppelin was no match for this racket.
That week, I started sitting out in my eighth-floor hallway in our little garden area on a plant platform. My neighbor Terry brought me a cute chair and pillow. I can sit there and read or talk to my neighbors when they emerge from the elevators. I really can’t do much but at least I can escape the noise. Other neighbors sit in their cars or go to the senior center or, now that it’s warm, go to the park.
After sitting in the hall for a week, I spoke up at the Residents Council meeting and requested a designated place where affected tenants can escape the noise. As a result, management gave us a respite space in some empty first-floor offices. I can’t work as effectively in this space because I use a desktop computer and do phone interviews, but it has been a helpful alternative on some days.
At the beginning of May, workers nailed heavy plastic over my three windows. It was intrusive having men on scaffolding walking past my personal space and when they were done it was even worse. I lost sunlight and views. I could not open my windows or run my AC. My apartment was stuffy and claustrophobic. I looked up from my computer on a day when I stayed home and felt like I was in a tomb. When it came down after ten days, I was resurrected- for a minute.
My special cross to bear is my living next to a vacant apartment getting every upgrade. That apartment recently got the new historic windows that cost $20,000 each and now it’s undergoing needed asbestos abatement followed by demolition and renovation, which will include taking down sheet rock. My floor and walls began vibrating from this work. I had to remove all art work from my walls, including a framed picture from a beloved Westbeth photographer, Shelley Seccombe.
Last year that apartment underwent lead abatement—also super loud. My neighbor with a studio in the building kindly let me crash in her home while she worked in her studio. In between the lead abatement and the asbestos abatement, the apartment next door was used as a locker room for the workers for eight months.
A month free?
During the Residents Council meeting in May, my neighbor argued that we should get a month free from our stabilized rent since we are on either side of this apartment. I backed her up. And we deserve a great new hallmate after all this suffering.
We’ve lost quiet and also free run of our campus. Westbeth has a lot of outdoor public space. I’d estimate 90% of it is now given over to scaffolding, storage of renovation equipment and materials, or active construction. The area of the courtyard where residents once held summer soirees, drinking wine and chatting, is now lined with portable toilets. One day, I was almost run over by a loading vehicle backing out into the walking pathway.
As the construction rips through the interior and exterior of the building, it’s ripping apart our lives and our livelihoods. Residents have lost income. A singing teacher took on fewer students. A social worker can’t speak with her clients. I’ve turned down assignments. The constant noise makes it harder to find productive work hours and more difficult to meet deadlines.
It’s an understatement to say I can’t get wait to get away to the beach this summer. But it’s hard to make plans when I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when. I’ll have to move out for at least two weeks when they schedule my window replacement- but when will that be? I’m dreading that upheaval and dismantling my home office. Westbeth management helps move furniture away from the windows and supplies a “hospitality suite” in a sparsely furnished vacant apartment. I’ve been warned, “Try to find someplace else to stay.”
Communication has improved since the project started. In addition to occasional town hall meetings, we now get a schedule by email with a preview of the upcoming two weeks: “noise, vibration, and dust” or “heavy noise, heavy vibration, and dust” or “smell and minor noise.” The noise moves around the building; the volume level changes. One day it was a ten in my apartment and a seven in the hallway garden, so I sat outside in the courtyard garden where the noise level was only a four.
Since a renovation this massive involves many moving parts, we tenants are pawns in this construction game. A master list exists somewhere but residents get short notices about even big disruptions. I only got a few days advance warning that the apartment next to me would undergo invasive and noisy work that would last for weeks.
As I wrote this piece (early in the mornings), I recalled the essay “Homeless” by Anna Quindlen, first published in Newsweek in 1987. Her analysis of home nailed why we Westbeth residents are stressed out.
“I love my home with a ferocity totally out of proportion to its appearance or location. I love dumb things about it: the hot-water heater, the plastic rack you drain dishes in, the roof over my head, which occasionally leaks. And yet it is precisely those dumb things that make it what it is—a place of certainty, stability, predictability, privacy, for me and for my family. It is where I live. What more can you say about a place than that? That is everything.”
That’s it! We’re upset because the construction has stripped away our sense of certainty, stability, predictability, privacy. We have lost a sense of control. Our home is in turmoil. The Residents Council does a great job promoting the arts, but why isn’t it advocating for our health and safety?
Westbeth is a NORC, a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, which means over 50% of the residents are seniors. Dust older than we are swirls around. Toxic smells seep in around windows despite plastic shields. My sleep was funky before this started, but now I wake up at 3 a.m. thinking, “What in fresh hell will happen today?”
Sleeping through meditation
Some days, I’ve crashed at 4:30 in the afternoon after the workers leave. More than once, I’ve slept through my meditation class, which I desperately need. I’ve also missed the online yoga class, which relieves my sciatica pain. My two Zoom writing workshops and my ukelele practice have fallen off.
I could not even escape when I was outside gardening. The planter box I maintain on Bethune Street is in front of the gallery where the drilling and pounding were in full swing. “Isn’t this pleasant?” my neighbor Marc said sarcastically as he got into his car in front of my garden.
Amid all this disruption, creative life continues, a sign of our tenacity as artists. Westbeth’s renovated gallery reopened in late April with a new show. The installation dance festival, West Fest, attracted crowds for two days in May. We let off steam dancing to a rockabilly band in the community room. The spring flea market was a big success. On another busy May weekend, people gathered at a book event and I ate shrimp and cake at my friend SuZen’s 80th birthday party, featuring soul singer Bobby Harden.
Years from now when all this is done, I imagine we’ll talk about the horrible period when the building was undergoing renovations, like we talk about the terrible flooding that came with Hurricane Sandy or the isolation of the Covid pandemic. But right now, it’s hellish to live in Westbeth. I pray we all survive.
