We moved to Westbeth in January 1970, the year the building opened, or reopened after conversion of Bell Labs into artists’ housing. We had been living in a small dark studio on Lexington and 65th Streets, one flight up; I was six months pregnant.
Our new apartment was a duplex full of cool north light, the kind painters require. The ceilings were high, fifteen feet, there were no internal walls and the windows, ten feet tall, were old fashioned, factory style, divided into large panes that rattled in the wind. Peter paints from the motif whenever possible. He painted the window frames into his first view of Bethune Street, as if to pay them tribute, starting out.
“You can’t bring people here. This neighborhood’s too rough,” the dealer at his gallery warned us. He ordered us to move at once to the Upper East Side. A friend who took UN diplomats’ wives on tours to artists’ studios told us the ladies had vetoed a proposed trip to the “waterfront.” The Far West Village was just too far out for them.
Joan laughed when I told her. Elegant, energetic, generous Joan McClure, a Village activist from way back, soon became our major ally on Bethune Street. I loved to hear her talk about the old days, when sailors on shore leave slept in the vestibule of her building on far west Perry Street and left her flowers in the morning.
Married several times, Joan met her last husband, Dean McClure, an architect and city planner, at a tree planting on Bethune. She moved from her tiny walkup across the street to his townhouse at 30 Bethune. Thanks in part to her efforts, the street was looking better, with new trees and planters, and flowers in the window boxes; hers were never empty. When she sold the house and moved away years later, she made the new owners promise to keep the window boxes full of color all year round.
She had a tiny back garden with a willow tree and a great spring crop of tulips. When they were in bloom each year, she gave a party and invited all her friends. She encouraged Peter to paint her garden, a change from the linearity of streets and smokestacks. Poet Amy Clampitt wrote an ode to Joan’s backyard trees.
Dean, the architect, designed a traffic island, no, a veritable garden, such as now exists, at the corner of Bethune and Hudson. Back then, around 1980, it was an ugly intersection full of arrows and useless warning signs, where north and southbound traffic often collided. Joan dragged me with her to make the case to our Congressman, Guy Molinari, on Staten Island. (In those days the West Village and a slice of Staten Island had been gerrymandered into a single Congressional district) She organized a demonstration outside Bleecker Street playground. I can still see her in her bright red jump suit and red shoes, pacing and shouting, “The City’s unfair to Abingdon Square.” The turnout wasn’t great. The press didn’t show. Dean, bemused bystander, chided, “Joan, the sixties are over.”
Not for Joan they weren’t. In the 80s, she threw herself into the fight for Westway, a projected new riverside park, which would cover a buried West Side Highway. Opponents feared the Village might in the end be walled in, behind the row of tall buildings bound to rise in the new space created from landfill at water’s edge.
“First let’s get our park, then we’ll fight to save it,” Joan insisted, “even if we have to hobble to the demonstrations and the hearings.”
She was as angry as I ever saw her, when they installed those iron arm rests in the middle of city park benches, depriving the homeless of a place to sleep. She supported Housing Works from the get-go. She canvassed local merchants for donations to the Halloween parade that emerged in its early years from the Westbeth courtyard, amid the giant puppets and dragons of stage genius Ralph Lee.
She bought a couple of my husband’s paintings. Walking by her house, I could see one over the fireplace in her front room, a waterfront scene like the ones that will be on view at Westbeth Gallery starting October 6. Along with landscapes from Italy, France, Mexico (Chiapas) and New Mexico, some riotous new still life, and some startlingly up to date paintings – completed in the 1960s – of blank faced politicians in dark suits and narrow ties; an all out retrospective (1950-2012) of a painter who turned 94 this year. Joan’s tulip garden will be on the wall. Joan will be missed.
Among Peter Ruta’s many shows: Museum of the City of New York (2004), Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig (2008) and Villa Rufolo, Ravello (2012). In 2000 and 2001 he painted the city from the 9lst Floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center. Opening reception Oct 6, 6-8 PM, 55 Bethune Street.
Gallery hours, Wed-Sun 1-6 PM, through October 21 2012.
Suzanne Ruta
Author, translator, critic
Reading from her new novel To Algeria, with Love, in the Westbeth gallery Oct 16 at 7 PM.
