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Alvin Ailey Hell's Kitchen Headquarters to Undergo $25M Expansion

By Maya Rajamani | August 15, 2016 5:42pm
 The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 405 W. 55th St.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 405 W. 55th St.
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DNAinfo/Maya Rajamani

HELL’S KITCHEN — The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Hell's Kitchen headquarters are getting a $25 million upgrade.

The modern dance company plans to increase the size of its Joan Weill Center for Dance at 405 W. 55th St., at the corner of Ninth Avenue, by more than 10,000 square feet, a spokesman confirmed Monday.

The expansion — which includes classroom space and four new dance studios — will help the company accommodate the growing number of dancers enrolling at its school, the Wall Street Journal first reported.

“We’re really bursting at the seams,” Bennett Rink, executive director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, told the paper.

Construction, which is scheduled to start in September, will “add three floors to the midblock section of the building along West 55th Street,” the Journal reported. 

When Alvin Ailey first floated plans for the expansion, Community Board 4 asked the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals to deny a variance they needed to build higher than zoning permits in the neighborhood allowed, citing concerns about maintaining the “contextual integrity” of the Clinton Special District.

The BSA granted the variance despite community opposition, the Journal reported.

The expansion will take approximately a year to complete, the paper said.