New Dramatists Theater (New York City, New York)

 theatre, interesting place

3-story Gothic-revival former-church completed in 1903. Designed by John Boese, it was originally the St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church, and subsequently housed the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, the Lutheran Metropolitan Inner Mission Society, and, by the mid-1960s, the All People's Church. New Dramatists is an organization of playwrights founded in 1949, moving here when the All People's Church closed, and adaptively reusing the building as a theater. The library is open to the public on weekdays.

The facade is clad in beige brick, with shallow limestone buttresses dividing it into a center section and smaller end wings, the eastern of which is actually the rectory. A high set of stone steps leads up to the main entrance, with paneled wooden double-doors in a limestone pointed-arch, below a gable; the stone piers around the entryway and gable are capped by crocketed finials, with a small one crowning the gable itself. To either side of the doorway is a narrow pointed-arch window. Above a stone band course that is overlapped by the gable and piers, the 2nd floor has a double-height pointed-arch opening with green metal and leaded-glass infill, divided into five bays. Metal spandrels between the 2nd & 3rd levels have Gothic trefoil patterns. The main gable of the facade tops this arch, with a serrated brick parapet and stone coping.

The west section of the facade has paired pointed-arch windows at the ground floor, above a basement areaway behind an iron fence. The 2nd floor has a single pointed-arch window, and the 3rd floor has shorter, paired pointed-arch windows. The roof line here is marked by an ornamented green metal band between green metal piers ending in small gables that reach approximately the height of the peak of the main gable.

The east section of the facade has a narrower set of steps leading up to a wooden door below a pointed-arch, formerly the rectory. The stone band continues below the 2nd floor, which has a matching window as the west wing. The 3rd floor is different, with a square-headed double-window in a dark-green metal surround topped by a green metal gable and short mansard.