August Wilson Theatre

The story

A Broadway house designed to look like a 15th-century Tuscan villa contains classrooms, a library, and a bookstore — because it was built not just as a stage but as a home for the Theatre Guild. C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim opened it in 1925 on West 52nd Street, tucking the auditorium a full story above ground to fit a lounge beneath it. Now named for Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, whose dates are 1945 to 2005, its landmarked facade still carries that unlikely Florentine confidence into Midtown.