Theater For the New City

Written by Emily Rose Clayton for Place Matters and Professor Gwynneth Malins Fall 2019 NYU Local and Community History Course

On September 16, 1986, the Theater for the New City moved into a new home at the corner of First Avenue and Tenth Street. Almost fifty years prior, on December 1, 1938, the First Avenue Retail Market opened as the first indoor market under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s initiative to clean up the streets of New York City. This simple stone building has served as an integral gathering point for the community for over eighty years, transitioning from an indoor market where neighborhood women shopped for the evening’s meal, to a bustling artistic center filled with experimental theater performances and artistic outreach programs.

In the 1930s, the streets of the Lower East Side were filled with pushcart peddlers, generally immigrants who lacked the capital to open a store front, but could scrounge...

Written by Emily Rose Clayton for Place Matters and Professor Gwynneth Malins Fall 2019 NYU Local and Community History Course

On September 16, 1986, the Theater for the New City moved into a new home at the corner of First Avenue and Tenth Street. Almost fifty years prior, on December 1, 1938, the First Avenue Retail Market opened as the first indoor market under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s initiative to clean up the streets of New York City. This simple stone building has served as an integral gathering point for the community for over eighty years, transitioning from an indoor market where neighborhood women shopped for the evening’s meal, to a bustling artistic center filled with experimental theater performances and artistic outreach programs.

In the 1930s, the streets of the Lower East Side were filled with pushcart peddlers, generally immigrants who lacked the capital to open a store front, but could scrounge together a portable stall and enough merchandise to support themselves and their families. While these peddlers were a picturesque and popular mainstay of immigrant neighborhoods, the pushcarts contributed to the problem of crowded, dirty city streets, and lacked any meaningful governmental oversight. In 1934, recently-elected Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia began an initiative to remove vendors from the narrow streets of the Lower East Side, moving them into clean, contained indoor markets. In conjunction with the Works Progress Administration and urban funding provided by the New Deal, the city’s Department of Markets commissioned architects Albert W. Lewis and John D. Churchill to design indoor retail market spaces across the city.

The First Avenue Retail Market was the first and largest of the new markets to open, and soon became an important community meeting spot. Historic photographs of the market show meat, fish, cheese, baked goods, produce, and dry goods such as tea, sugar, and flour being sold to the neighborhood’s predominantly Jewish and Italian clientele. During World War II era rationing, the New York City League of Women Voters used the market as a center to assist neighborhood women with complex rationing systems, ensuring each woman got the best value out of her points. By the 1950s, however, LaGuardia’s retail markets were struggling, and the First Avenue location closed in 1965. The building was taken over by the New York Department of Sanitation, which saved the historic building from destruction until the Theater for the New City acquired the space in 1986 and once again opened the building to the neighborhood it had faithfully served.

The Theater for the New City (TNC) was founded in 1970 by Crystal Field and George Bartenieff, and is strongly rooted in a sense of artistic community, giving its creators space to experiment and flourish without restriction. This freedom to grow and nurture art would soon overflow the confines of the theatrical world into the surrounding communities, profoundly impacting the people who lived there. For the first seven years, TNC bounced around the West Village, beginning in the Westbeth artist’s community. The company debuted with a series of street theater pieces, a genre which would become central to TNC’s mission to bring art to the average New Yorker.

The fledgling theater company soon moved two streets north to the Jane West hotel, a ramshackle welfare hotel located amidst abandoned warehouses, drug addicts, and prostitutes. TNC continued to produce experimental street theater, beginning a tradition of creating stories based on problems and situations from the surrounding neighborhoods. The politically and socially charged pieces which result from these creations are not only relatable to local residents who recognize their own struggles on stage, but have been instrumental in activism and meaningful change for New York City. One such example was titled “The Expressway,” a musical which protested an east-to-west superhighway designed by Robert Moses that would have decimated Greenwich Village. This street theater tradition continues today as the Annual Summer Street Theater Tour, which visits all five boroughs, focusing on social awareness and civic dialogue with over 25,000 audience members – many of whom would never have access to a traditional theater performance.

TNC also pioneered Greenwich Village’s most flamboyant spectacle – the annual Village Halloween Parade. Along with famed puppeteer Ralph Lee, TNC organized the first parades in 1974 and 1975, with over 75 members of the company leading a costumed procession from Jane Street to Washington Square, pausing along the route to put on mini-shows. Featuring Lee’s extravagant theatrical puppets and masks, the 1975 parade won a Village Voice Obie Award, with the committee calling the parade “an event of startling theatrical imagination.” Neighborhood children were encouraged to dress up and join in the parade as it wandered through the streets of the Village, beginning the tradition of community involvement and celebration which continues in the parade to this day.

In 1977, TNC moved into the East Village. Its new home was a cramped basement theater in the Baptist Tabernacle building on Second Avenue, where the company cemented itself as an East Village institution with an artistic home for everyone. TNC continued to nurture experimental artists from marginalized groups, while strengthening community engagement and dedicating themselves to providing accessible theater. Unafraid to gamble on new artists and new ideas, TNC became home to a number of extremely influential plays, most notably Sam Shephard’s Buried Child, which premiered on October 19th, 1978 to considerable critical acclaim, and would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

With rising rents, however, TNC once again found itself in search of a new home in the mid-1980s. With the help of the National Endowment for the Arts and New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, TNC set its sights on the nearby First Avenue Retail Market, owned by the city Sanitation Department. After lengthy negotiations with the city, TNC secured the building at a cost of $717,000 in September 1986. After an intense period of clean-up and renovation, TNC opened its new space with the aptly named “Festival for Raw Space,” featuring the Thunderbird American Indians. On January 26, 2013, TNC celebrated a “Burn the Mortgage” event which marked the final payment on the building, ensuring the legacy of the company would be secure in the East Village.

Since moving into the First Avenue location, TNC has revitalized the historic building, which now boasts four dedicated theater spaces, along with an art gallery and rehearsal and meeting spaces to serve the surrounding community. TNC continues to provide a home for marginalized theater communities, including African-American, Asian, Latinx, Native American, and LGBT artists. The company also maintains its neighborhood outreach, with a number of programs which emphasize the uniquely intimate relationship TNC has woven with local residents.

TNC’s Arts in Education program brings low-income children into an After School Theater Workshop specifically designed to foster communication and self-esteem in at-risk students. Ticket prices are capped at $20, ensuring that the majority of residents can afford to see live theater, and the Free Ticket program offers over 4,000 free tickets per season through 25 different community organizations. TNC also sponsors the Community Festival Program, including the Village Halloween Costume Ball, Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, and Annual Tree Lighting Celebration in Tompkins Square Park, all of which allow neighborhood residents to experience TNC’s artistic diversity.

Unlike many avant-garde theater companies, The Theater for the New City found a unique and valuable ability to connect with the community in a meaningful way. The company has built a strong tradition which impacts and enriches the lives of neighborhood residents, while allowing artists a place to learn and grow. This sense of community can be traced back through the nearly fifty years of theatrical history which bounced from place to place across the West Village, before finally coming to rest in a building designed to bring people together in a different way – the First Avenue Retail Market.