Circle in the Square Theater (former)
159 Bleecker Street | also 161 Bleecker Street | Greenwich Village | built 1918
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1917
Samuel Levingson designs a two-story movie theater for Elsie Angiola at 159 Bleecker Street
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Architect Samuel Levingson designed the building for owner Elsie Angiola in 1917-18. It combined a motion picture theater and shops on the ground floor with offices on the second, and was known as the Luxor. Its brick front carried pilasters and decorative panels at the lower two stories, a portion of which survived the later conversion.
“…originally constructed in 1917 to contain a motion picture theater and stores at the first story and offices at the second story…”
- 1947
New Stages begins staging plays in the former Luxor movie house on Bleecker Street
In 1947 a company of actors and technicians called New Stages, Inc. began putting on plays in the former Luxor cinema. Its productions of Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute and Lorca's Blood Wedding were successes, but the troupe was losing money by the end of the 1949 season and stopped producing. New York Times critic Arthur Gelb later traced the Off-Broadway revival in the Village back to this company.
- 1951
The family-run Amato Opera Company makes the Bleecker Street theater its home
During the 1950s the building housed the Amato Opera Company, a family-run nonprofit founded in 1951 that gave free opera performances many times a week. The landmark report notes a live theater tradition on the site of more than fifty years by then. Anthony and Sally Amato used the building until 1959, when the Circle in the Square company took over.
- 1959
Circle in the Square moves into 159 Bleecker Street and stages major Off-Broadway productions
The Circle in the Square company, which had opened in Sheridan Square as one of the first in-the-round theaters in the country, took over the Bleecker Street house around 1959. Its stage there saw Desire Under the Elms by O'Neill, with George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, in 1963, Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena (1970), and Lanford Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore, which ran from 1973 to 1976. The company opened an uptown theater in 1972 but kept this house for smaller experimental work until 1997, when it was leased to the New School.
- 2004
The theater is gutted and an eight-story apartment tower rises above its base
In 2004 the old theater building was emptied out and an eight-story apartment tower was built on top of it. The second story was removed, leaving the original two-story brick base as the lower part of the new building, and work was finished around 2007. Some historic sign boxes at street level remain.
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