50 West 13th Street

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3-story Greek-revival residential/theater building completed in 1846 as a townhouse for William B. Fash. From 1857 to 1884, the building was owned and used as a residence and place of business by Jacob Day, an abolitionist businessman. After Day’s death in 1884, his sons Charles Day and Jacob Day, Jr. continued to own the property and carried on the catering business at this address until 1896, when it was sold to Mary E. Lawson. For at least eight years, between 1902 and 1910, architect John Davidson lived and worked in the house. In 1941 the basement and parlor levels were renovated for the Design Technics School. The top two floors remained a one-family residence. In 1959, 50 West 13th Street was renovated to house a theater at the basement level, a school on the first story, and residences on the remaining upper two stories. Among other tenants, the ground-breaking four-member Afro-American Folklore Troupe had a residency at the theater in 1968, performing poetry, folklore and works by well-known Black writers James Weldon Johnson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leroi Jones and Langston Hughes. From 1972 to 2020, the building was the home of the 13th Street Repertory Company, one of New York’s longest-operating “Off-Off-Broadway” theaters, founded by Edith O’Hara.

The facade is clad in yellow-painted brick (green at the ground floor), three bays wide. A stoop on the east side leads to a doorway framed in ornamented metal. The basement, accessed through the under-stoop entrance, features a large central window, a configuration that may date to the period of Jacob Day’s catering business in the 1870s. Above, a metal fire escape added sometime in the mid-1900s runs down the right two-thirds of the facade, which is topped by a black metal roof cornice. The windows have stone sills and lintels (decorated at the 2nd and 3rd floors with incised ogee arches).

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