After nearly two years of struggling with the Village community over its reconstruction of the Provincetown Playhouse, NYU is set to reopen the building at 139 MacDougal St. this October.
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The two-year construction project angered many residents of the Village when portions of the historic playhouse, which was originally converted from a bottling plant to a theater in 1918, were destroyed.
Although NYU had originally promised to preserve the integrity of the building, portions of the walls were demolished for safety as the building is being reconstructed to house Law School classrooms, as well as a new theater.
The new facilites at 133-139 MacDougal St. will be home to a number of NYU Law School programs, centers and institutes. Alicia Hurley, vice president of government affairs and community engagement, said this new building will be used to research fields that include the intersection of law with business and policy.
Although the theater in the building will be fully functional at the beginning of the semester, the grand reopening of the Provincetown Playhouse will be held in December.
Despite tensions with Greenwich Village locals, Hurley said she believes the construction project was a success.
"It preserved a working theater of historic reputation, it produced a contextual building, it was overwhelmingly approved by the community board ... and it accomplished all this while meeting the Law School's important academic needs," she said.
However, Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and a vocal critic of NYU expansion, said he was disappointed with the construction process at the site. According to Berman, NYU had been given community support based on the promise that all four walls of the original Provincetown Playhouse would remain standing. During work at 139 MacDougal St., part of an original wall was not structurally sound and had to be removed.
"Unfortunately, the project became an emblem of another broken promise in a long history of broken promises by the administration of the university," Berman said.
He also said he believes most Village residents are disappointed by the loss of the original building, which was eligible for the New York State and National Register of Historic Places.
"In general, there is a sadness about more and more pieces of the rich and proud history of the neighborhood [being] gobbled up by the big university, especially when there are reasonable alternatives," Berman said.
During its heyday, the theater hosted shows by playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill and E.E. Cummings.
