History is baked into 466 Grand Street—its bricks, floors, concrete waffle slabs, and the ground underneath its rounded amphitheater. The 1975 addition by architect Lo-Yi Chan (of Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen) to Henry Street Settlement’s Neighborhood Playhouse has long been a Lower East Side staple, hosting what is today called the Abrons Arts Center. Kim Förster and Alan Moore published an entire book about the complex in 2015. The venerable milieu below the Williamsburg Bridge is remembered for helping “form the foundation for modern American performance” arts.
This past June, a restoration on Abrons Arts Center was completed by Li/Saltzman Architects, a New York office. The most noticeable changes are a redesigned main entrance, a new elevator, ADA bathrooms, a new ramp in the Upper Gallery, an expansion to the Main Gallery, and a new vestibule for the Experimental Theater. The exterior amphitheater has been renamed Miriam and Harold Steinberg Plaza after the benefactors who made the renovation possible.
Abrons Arts Center will reopen this fall. Judith Saltzman, principal of Li/Saltzman Architects, described the venture in a statement as making a “significant cultural resource in our city” more “sustainable, accessible, and adaptable for its 21st century life.”
466 Grand Street: Then and Now
The late modernist ensemble by Lo-Yi Chan was remarkable when it was built in 1975 for a few reasons. First, it’s formally interesting, and was collaboratively designed by Chan with an intergenerational, multi-racial cohort of Lower East Side residents—signaling perhaps one of the first instances of public interest design in the U.S. Second, it was financed during a terrible fiscal crisis, around the time President Gerald Ford (purportedly) told New York politicians looking for a bail out: “DROP DEAD.”
Indeed, when the city was strapped for cash, and the Bronx burned, Abrons Arts Center miraculously rose in the Lower East Side, providing a bastion of cultural expression in a then-atrophying metropolis.
It all started in 1915 when a local theater troupe moved into an existing 3-story brick building at 466 Grand Street. There, Neighborhood Playhouse Theater set up shop, abutting its neighbor in the Henry Street Settlement House, founded five years earlier by reformer Lillian Wald.
History was made shortly after while the Henry Street Settlement House welcomed W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Jane Addams into its halls, and the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater broke down ethnic barriers in the arts with Jewish and NAACP leaders. Epic plays followed that are still celebrated today like Rachel (1917) by Angelina Weld Grimké, an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
During the Great Depression, Neighborhood Playhouse Theater became a hotbed for left-leaning shows that spoke of the perils working class people faced those years, like Dollars and Sense directed by Walter Wright.
In 1937, Neighborhood Playhouse Theater was renamed Henry Street Playhouse. Over time, lauded folk singer Jean Ritchie played there, and noteworthy artists like Ernest Bloch, Kurt Schindler, and Louis Horst composed music. After the war, avant-garde director Alwin Nikolais took over the theater, and invited his contemporaries to perform, often wearing striking, Merce Cunningham-inspired costumes.
With a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1970, Woodie King Jr. founded New Federal Theater in the basement of St. Augustine’s Church on Henry Street, together with members of Henry Street Settlement House. His purpose was to tell stories about African Americans, stories that were underrepresented in “white-controlled theatres.” Five years later, Lo-Yi Chan completed what is now the Abrons Arts Center accompanied by Woodie King Jr. and many Lower East Side residents.
The Next 50 Years
Abrons Arts Center played an important role for activists during the HIV/AIDS crisis which rocked New York in the 1980s. It continued to provide pro bono arts education for children in the Lower East Side, and opportunities for artists of color. The venue was renovated in the 1990s, and this latest batch of upgrades will help Abrons Arts Center perform the next fifty years, just as Henry Street Settlement’s founders imagined over a century ago.
Phase one of the renovation by Li/Saltzman Architects started in December 2023 and lasted through March 2024. That brought changes to the main entrance, lobby, Culpeper Gallery, and Upper Gallery. Phase two (March 2024 through June 2024) upgraded the amphitheater, Main Gallery and Experimental Theater.
“Abrons Arts Center and Henry Street Settlement are excited to build on the dynamic architecture of the center to further increase access to our services for the community,” said Ali Rosa-Salas, Abrons Arts Center’s Vice President of Visual and Performing Arts. “This is an opportunity to have our values be borne out by our physical space.”
Programming at Abrons Arts Center will recommence in the fall.
