Cherry Lane Theatre

The Cherry Lane Theatre at thirty-eight Commerce Street is marked by a modest, three-story brick façade and a black awning. Built in eighteen-seventeen as a farm silo, the building later functioned as a brewery, a tobacco warehouse, and a box factory. In nineteen-twenty-four, a group of artists including the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay converted the industrial space into a playhouse. The stage was so compact that entertainer George M. Cohan once quipped that a performer might as well act in a telephone booth.