Previous |
Next Landscape Award Celebrates a 'Transformational' Fountain at Harvard |
April 30, 2008, 11:36 AM ET
NYU Plans to Demolish Playhouse Where Eugene O’Neill Once Worked
The Provincetown Playhouse, where Eugene O’Neill put on plays early in his career, may be torn down by New York U. (Photo by Seth Werkheiser)
New York University has a plan to demolish the Provincetown Playhouse, in Greenwich Village, a theater where Eugene O’Neill put on his first plays and where Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, Paul Robeson, and Bette Davis once performed.
The demolition would be part of a plan to acquire and renovate six million square feet of space in the city, The New York Times reports. University officials emphasized that the demolition was merely a proposal, and that NYU would discuss the plan with neighbors and preservationists. An architect for the university said a new building on the site would more closely resemble the theater prior to a 1940s renovation that combined four buildings.
According to a history of the theater compiled by a doctoral student at NYU, the actors and playwrights opened the playhouse in that location in 1918. It had been a horse stable, but was used at the time as a bottling plant. “To remind themselves that the space was once a stable, a hitching post was left hanging from one of the walls, with the inscription painted above it: ‘Here Pegasus Was Hitched,’” the account says.
Preservationists are alarmed about the plan. Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, told the Times that the theater is “a beloved piece of our city’s history” and that its demolition would “create an enormous rift between the university and the surrounding community, preservationists, theater lovers, that I’m not sure how easy it will ever be to repair.”
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.