Hands down, New York's most important, consistently daring major theater. The box office players strung along the grimy streets west of Times Square, turning out an unappetizing mix of revivals and musicals, have nothing on the Public Theater, a stunning Romanesque Revival fortress just south of Astor Square, where legendary director and producer George C. Wolfe annually mounts two or three of the season's most talked about plays (including the storied Shakespeare in the Park series, which casts the most renowned American actors of stage and screen in intimate productions at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park). The buildings here were designed in several stages for John Jacob Astor, the pelt merchant turned wildly rich real estate speculator, as the city's first public library, in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. Slated for demolition in the 1960s, the even-more-legendary director George C. Papp intervened, transforming the building's interior into a collection of performance spaces ranging from the grandiose to the extremely private.