Edna St. Vincent Millay, Kim Hunter, and Robert Emmett
New York, New York, New York
Marker Inscription
38 Commerce Street. In 1924 Edna St. Vincent Millay and a group of theatre artists converted a box factory into what would become The Cherry Lane Theatre. Through the years, it has become a showcase for the early works of Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard, and continues to nurture emerging artists. Acclaimed actress Kim Hunter 1922-2002, lived above this theatre with her playwright husband Robert Emmett from 1954 until her death. Best known for creating the role of "Stella" in the Broadway and film version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" Kim's Academy Award-winning career spanned over 50 years of stage, screen, and television. She was a lifetime member of the BBC Block Association and a beloved citizen of Greenwich Village.
Erected by Bedford Barrow Commerce Block Association
The Story
In 1924 the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and fellow theatre artists converted a Greenwich Village box factory into the Cherry Lane Theatre, which became a proving ground for daring new American drama, staging early work by Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard. Decades later the Academy Award–winning actress Kim Hunter—celebrated as the original "Stella" in A Streetcar Named Desire—lived above the theatre with her playwright husband, Robert Emmett, until her death in 2002.
Why it matters
The Cherry Lane is one of the oldest continuously running off-Broadway theatres, a cradle of the experimental drama that reshaped the American stage.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the 1920s, Greenwich Village had become the beating heart of bohemian America. Its cheap rents, crooked streets, and tolerant spirit drew poets, painters, and playwrights who wanted to make art on their own terms, far from the polite conventions of uptown. It was a neighborhood where a poet and a handful of friends might decide, on their own nerve, to start a theatre.
That impulse was part of a national awakening in the American theatre. Small companies were springing up to stage new, serious, homegrown drama — work that Broadway's commercial houses would not risk. These "little theatres" were laboratories, and Greenwich Village was one of their capitals.
Across the middle of the twentieth century, the neighborhood kept that role. As the marker's second story reminds us, it remained a place where working artists lived side by side with their neighbors, where an Academy Award winner might be a beloved regular on the block and a lifetime member of the local association.
People & events
The story begins in 1924, when the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and a group of theatre artists took an old box factory on Commerce Street and turned it into the Cherry Lane Theatre. That act of transformation — a workshop of prose and pasteboard becoming a stage — is the founding legend of one of the Village's most enduring institutions.
What followed made the little theatre famous. Its stage became a showcase for the early works of some of the boldest playwrights of the modern era — Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard among them — the kind of challenging, experimental drama that reshaped what audiences expected from a night at the theatre.
The marker then tells a second, more intimate story layered on top of the first. The acclaimed actress Kim Hunter, who lived from 1922 to 2002, made her home above the theatre with her playwright husband, Robert Emmett, from 1954 until her death. Best known for creating the role of Stella in both the Broadway and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire, she won an Academy Award and worked across stage, screen, and television for more than half a century — and, the inscription is careful to add, she was a lifetime member of the block association and a beloved citizen of the Village.
Its place in the American story
The Cherry Lane connects a single Village address to the whole arc of modern American drama. The off-Broadway movement it helped embody gave playwrights a place to take risks that the commercial theatre could not, and much of the daring writing that defined the twentieth-century stage first found an audience in rooms exactly like this one.
The playwrights named on the marker are not a random list; together they represent a revolution in what a play could be — leaner, stranger, more honest, willing to unsettle. That such early work found a home on Commerce Street places this little theatre near the source of a current that ran through the entire national culture.
Kim Hunter's presence deepens the significance. Her Stella belongs to one of the most influential American plays ever written, a work that helped redefine acting and drama in her generation. That an artist of her stature lived quietly above this stage, woven into the daily life of her neighborhood, captures something true about how American art is made — not in isolation, but inside a community.
If you visit
Commerce Street is one of those short, curving Village lanes that feels like a secret. Come find number 38 and take in the plain fact the marker celebrates: this modest building, once a factory, has been a working theatre for the better part of a century. Its unassuming face is part of its charm.
Stand back and read the walls of the neighborhood as you go. This corner of Greenwich Village layers story upon story — a poet's bold idea, a roll call of groundbreaking playwrights, an Oscar-winning actress at home upstairs. Few blocks hold so much cultural history in so little space.
If you can, make it part of an evening rather than an afternoon. The Village comes alive after dark, and there is a rightness to walking these streets when the theatres are lit. Let this marker anchor a slow wander through one of America's great creative neighborhoods, and imagine the box factory's lights coming up on something no one had ever seen before.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Plan your visit
NearbyMake a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.
Museums & culture
- 81 Leonard Gallery1.0 mi away
- Gerben Fine Art1.0 mi away
- Bureau1.1 mi away · 112 Duane Street
- Cloud Gallery1.2 mi away
- Hall des Lumières1.2 mi away · 49 Chambers Street, New York, NY
- 9/11 Memorial & Museum1.4 mi away · 180 Greenwich Street, New York, NY
Attractions
- The River Project Wetlab0.5 mi away
- FDNY Ladder 80.8 mi away · 14 North Moore Street, New York
- Dream house0.9 mi away
- Sherman Zwicker0.9 mi away
- Cortlandt Alley1.0 mi away
- Textile building1.0 mi away
Food & drink
- Maman1.9 mi away
- Sweetgreen1.9 mi away
- Semicolon Cafe1.9 mi away
- Greene Hook Bar & Kitchen2.0 mi away
- Bluestone Lane2.0 mi away
- Yaso2.0 mi away · 30 Hudson Street, Jersey City, NJ
Places to stay
- Conrad1.3 mi away · 102 North End Avenue, New York
- M Social Hotel New York Downtown1.4 mi away · 55 Church Street, New York, NY
- Residence Inn New York Downtown Manhattan/World Trade Center Area1.5 mi away · 170 Broadway, New York, NY
- Holiday Inn1.6 mi away · 51 Nassau Street
- World Center Hotel1.6 mi away · 144 Washington Street, New York, NY
- Club Quarters Hotel at World Trade Center1.6 mi away · 140 Washington Street, New York, NY
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Related people
- · Edna St. Vincent Millay
- · Kim Hunter
- · Robert Emmett
Related events
- · Founding of the Cherry Lane Theatre
Themes & tags
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