Westside Theatre

The story

A German Baptist congregation built this Romanesque Revival church in 1890, then nightclubs moved in after the 1960s, and now actors perform where worshippers once prayed and dancers once sweated. Henry Franklin Kilburn designed the building at 407 West 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen. It became a theatre in 1976, was renovated in 1991, and today holds two stages: the Upstairs, seating 270, and the Downstairs, a thrust-stage room for 249. That arc from sanctuary to disco to off-Broadway feels, as one writer put it, like a play in three acts.