The first time I came upon the Maison Française I was quite unprepared. It was the summer of 1988 and I was new to New York. To stumble across Washington Mews, that cobblestone lane with the twostory residences that once housed coaches and horses belonging to the handsome mansions on Washington Square North, and to discover, at the end of the row, the Maison Française, this was a moment of pure magic. I felt as if I’d been transported to Montmartre.

I enrolled in a philosophy course there. We were a small group, and met two evenings a week. I’d arrive early and read the French newspapers in the library upstairs, and afterward a couple of us would sometimes eat nearby. Our professeur, who had come from Paris for the summer, told us how much he loved the streets around Washington Square, where the brownstones had a human scale, the bars and cafés overflowed onto the sidewalks, and you could always find good jazz in the evenings. Simone de Beauvoir, back in 1947, had felt the same way about the Village. “The right angles break down; the streets are no longer numbered but have names; the lines curve and tangle together,” she wrote in “America Day by Day.” “I’m wandering through a European city.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, the empty stables and carriage houses in Washington Mews had been transformed into artists’ studio residences, inspired by Paris’s Latin Quarter. The Village, with its ateliers and Italian cafés, carried a strong whiff of Europe. But in the 1950s, the area was threatened by a paradigmatically New York phenomenon. New York University, which previously had its main campus in the Bronx, decided to relocate entirely to Washington Square, and for the next two decades, the university bought up property, demolished old buildings, and erected high rises that were soulless even by the standard of the time. Entire blocks were razed. By some miracle, Washington Mews was preserved.

In the midst of this building frenzy, a small woman with the vision of an artist entered the fray. Germaine Brée, the chair of NYU’s Department of Romance Languages, convinced the university administrators that the red brick house at the corner of Washington Mews and University Place would be an ideal space for a “French House.” She persuaded her friends, the Schlumbergers, a French family in the oil-drilling business, to contribute the $80,000 remodeling costs. Lucien David, a French architect, was commissioned to create a suitably Gallic atmosphere. The Maison Française was officially opened on April 26, 1957. This year is the 50th anniversary.

Who was Germaine Brée, the woman to whom we owe the “jewel box” of NYU? Anyone who studied French literature in the 1960s and ’70s knows her name. As a French student in Australia, I read her books on Proust, Gide, Sartre, and Camus. The daughter of a French mother and English father, Brée was bilingual, and at home in both cultures. She was 29 when she came to America to teach French. A contemporary of the Existentialists, she shared their belief in “commitment.” During World War II she took leave from Bryn Mawr College to work for the Free French Army in Algeria, first in an ambulance unit, then as an intelligence officer, and was awarded a Bronze Star for her courage. She was at NYU for only seven years, between 1953 and 1960, and in that time she chaired the French department (the first female chair at NYU), wrote a biography of Camus, and founded the Maison Française, where one year later the French Ambassador would pin the Legion of Honor to her lapel for her contribution to French culture.

In her rosiest dreams, Brée could hardly have imagined what a success the Maison Française would be. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, everything coming out of France seemed spankingly new. Cinema was experiencing a Nouvelle Vague (François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer); there was the Nouveau Théatre (Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco); the Nouveau Roman (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Michel Butor); the Nouvelle Critique, with its structuralist and post-structuralist offshoots (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu); and the Nouveaux Philosophes (Bernard Henri-Lévy, André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut). There was Lacanian psychoanalysis (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), French feminism (Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray) and François Mitterrand’s socialism. At one time or another, most of these people, the cream of French creativity, turned up to talk at 16 Washington Mews.

Everyone agrees: The secret of the Maison’s success is its intimacy and charm. It’s a space in which conversation can take flight and passions flare. The auditorium, at street level, has a seating capacity of 100. After the talks, those who wish can climb the stairs and continue the discussion over drinks, and sometimes a buffet dinner. Mitterrand, who visited the little house three times in 15 years, hailed it with warm enthusiasm as “a salon, in the 18th-century sense of the word.”

Americans tell you how fortunate they feel to have such privileged access to French visitors. “I’ve had some of my best times in New York in that place,” says Richard Sieburth, who joined the NYU French department, from Harvard, in 1983. “Magnificent, hilarious, fabulous evenings.” His eyes twinkle and he fingers his bushy moustache. “I met French people I’d never have met in Paris. Writers, artists, musicians, intellectuals. For them the Maison Française was an extraterritorial space. They felt less constrained than in Paris. This was downtown New York; this was Greenwich Village!” Mr. Sieburth remembers parties when the “drunken dancing” would go on until 4 in the morning. “And the thing is, all this went along with extraordinary excellence!”

The Maison Française is a nonprofit institution, open to the general public, and nearly all events are free. The director has to look for funding from outside — from French companies, the French Embassy, cultural foundations, private donations. Tom Bishop, whom Brée appointed director in 1959, when he was not yet 30, came up with the idea of a Carnaval de Paris in Washington Mews. It took months of hard work and required the usual hunt for sponsors. In May 1962, the lane was festooned with tricolor lights and banners; booths under bright umbrellas sold everything from Dior hosiery to perfume; a raffle offered two return airfares to Paris; French restaurants served liver paté, shrimp aspic, and caviar at tables under the trees. Then the Montmartre cabaret singer Bricktop stepped onto the stage and the dance floor filled up. The following year, the event once again made a splash in the New York social pages.

***

When I examine the old Maison Française programs in their boxes in the University Archives, I am staggered by the richness of it all. Fifty years of talks, panels, debates, art exhibitions, receptions, film evenings, as many as three events a week, with subjects as wide-ranging as they possibly could be. A doctor in Médecins Sans Frontières talks about “Medicine and Social Responsibility”; a French lawyer speaks on “Internet and the Law.” The Maison Française has never shied away from controversy. In the past four years there have been roundtable discussions on the tension between France and America over the war in Iraq, the banning of the veil in French public schools, and the riots that broke out in the immigrant ghettoes of Paris.

The current director of the Maison Française, Francine Goldenhar, has the bilingual background, broad cultural interests, and dynamism that make her ideally suited to a demanding role she obviously loves. She’s busier than ever this anniversary year, hosting art exhibitions, panels, receptions, and theatrical performances. These days, the Maison Française program gives due emphasis to “Francophonie,” the vast world of French speakers outside the Hexagon, and panelists from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, and the Caribbean discuss subjects like neo-colonialism, racism, and the problems of migration.

In late April and early May, the French face national elections that are likely to change their country dramatically. The blossom will be out in the cobbled lane, the anniversary celebrations will be in full swing, and the Maison Française will be jumping.

Ms. Rowley’s most recent book is “Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre” (Harper-Collins). She lives in New York.