Westbeth Artists Housing is a nonprofit housing and commercial complex dedicated to providing affordable living and working space for artists and arts organizations in New York City. The complex comprises the full city block bounded by West, Bethune, Washington and Bank Streets in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City; the complex is named for the streets West and Bethune. It occupies the Bell Laboratories Buildings, which were the headquarters of Bell Telephone Laboratories 1898–1966, before being converted in 1968–1970. That conversion was overseen by architect Richard Meier. This low- to moderate-income rental housing and commercial real estate project, the largest in the world of its type, was developed with the assistance of the J.M. Kaplan Fund and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Westbeth is owned and operated by Westbeth Corp. Housing Development Fund Corp. Inc., a New York not-for-profit corporation governed by an unpaid, volunteer board of directors. , Westbeth has a very old population, including many original tenants – about 60% of tenants were over the age of 60 years, and about 30% were over the age of 70. It is thus a naturally occurring retirement community, and has an on-site social worker. Children of tenants are allowed to take over their parents' apartment, and thus there is a multi-generational community. Due to the 10–12-year waiting period for an apartment, Westbeth closed its residential waiting list in 2007. This changed on March 18, 2019 when the institution started accepting applications for an indefinite period of time. History Westbeth is among the first examples of adaptive reuse of industrial buildings for artistic and residential use in the United States. It is a complex of 13 buildings in Manhattan's West Village, which was originally part of the Bell Laboratories Building (1898–1966), one of the world's most important industrial research centers. The Bell Labs building was home to many inventions, including the vacuum tube, the condenser microphone, an early version of television, and the transistor. The complex was vacated by Bell Labs in the middle 1960s, and remained empty until the Westbeth project started later in the decade. Using seed money from the J.M. Kaplan Fund and help and encouragement from the National Council for the Arts (which has since become the National Endowment for the Arts), an ambitious renovation project designed to create live-work spaces for 384 artists of all disciplines was initiated under