155 First Avenue; 155-157 First Avenue; 230-240 East 10th Street | Block : 451 | Lot #7502

Description & Building Alterations

The one-story structure at 155 First Avenue was originally built in 1938 by the city to house the First Avenue Retail Market. This was a signature project of Fiorello LaGuardia, New York’s first Italian-American mayor (who was born just a few blocks away in Greenwich Village), who sought to get all of the peddlers and carts off of New York’s overcrowded streets and into safe, modern, sanitary indoor marketplaces.  Dozens of these marketplaces were built across the city, all bearing a similar WPA-inspired art deco streamlined look, giving thousands of merchants for the first time a controlled environment within which to sell their goods and millions of New Yorkers a more orderly place within which to shop for them. The First Avenue Retail Market was one of the first and largest of the lot. Located in the heart of the East Village’s Little Italy, it was chock full of vendors selling cheeses, meat, olives, and other Italian delicacies as well as other kinds of food.

Of course by the post-World War II years these indoor markets, which were the cutting edge of modernity when they opened, were being rapidly replaced by the new innovation of supermarkets.  By 1965 the First Avenue Retail Market had closed, its space taken over by the Department of Sanitation.  Fortunately, by 1986 a new use was introduced to the space – The Theater for the New City, which showcases avant garde writers and performers whose work might not be seen elsewhere. The building’s one-story section contains four theaters.

The 16-story condo above the theater, aka Theater for the New City (TNC), was completed in 2001 after a partnership of two developers bought the air rights over the original structure. This, based on the agreement among the theater, the city, and the developers helped raise the mortgage burden on the theater. In residence at the theater is the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers which was founded in 1963 to keep alive the traditions, songs, and dances they had learned from their parents and added to this knowledge from other tribes also living in New York. It is the oldest resident Native American dance company in New York City and one of the oldest in the United States.