Cherry Lane Theatre

The story

A farm silo built in 1817 became a brewery, then a tobacco warehouse, then a box factory — before Edna St. Vincent Millay and her collaborators decided it should be a theater. They converted the Commerce Street structure and opened the Cherry Lane Playhouse in 1923. Its first reviewed production was Saturday Night by Robert Presnell, the following February. In 1954 the theater furnished itself with pieces sold off from Rockefeller Center's failing Center Theatre. Today it holds that distinction no renovation can manufacture: oldest continuously running off-Broadway theater in New York City.