Hell’s Kitchen has changed a lot in the more than 20 years since Willie Reale started the 52nd Street Project, a program that brings professional actors together with children from the neighborhood to create original plays.

The area is now called Clinton (if mostly by real estate agents and developers). And instead of being known for its crime rate, it’s known for great restaurants and the large number of new condominiums rising into the sky.

Now, thanks to a multiuse project engineered by the city, the 52nd Street Project is getting its own slick digs in one of the new high-rises. Archstone Clinton, which stretches from 51st Street to 53rd Street, on the west side of Tenth Avenue, includes 6 luxury condos and 627 rental apartments, 20% of which are affordable housing. It also has spaces for three theater tenants. The 52nd Street Project’s new space, which will open in 2009, has 17,000 square feet, including a 150-seat flexible-layout theater, rehearsal space, classrooms, offices, and a vast, open lounge area for the children.

Several actors who have volunteered with the project, including Lili Taylor and Martha Plimpton, are expected at a “groundbreaking” ceremony today for the project’s new space. (Archstone Clinton is already built, but the theater is not yet fitted out.)

One of the other theater tenants will be the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, the organization of off-Broadway theaters. The third is rumored to be the off-Broadway MCC Theater, which in recent years has presented most of its productions at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street. MCC would have both a 199-seat and a 99-seat theater in the building.

“It’s a really exciting project for the city, in part because we’ve never been able to do anything like it before,” New York City’s cultural affairs commissioner, Kate Levin, said of the theaters in Archstone Clinton.

Mr. Reale, who is a playwright and lyricist, was doing a show at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in 1981, when someone from the Police Athletic League across the street called and asked if anyone at the theater could teach an acting class for neighborhood children. Mr. Reale volunteered. “To make it more interesting, I wrote a play for the kids to perform,” he said. “My friends came in and did costumes and lights and stuff, and it was kind of deluxe.”

When the show was over, he thought that would be it. But “I was walking out after the last performance, and a little girl literally tugged me by the shirttail and said, ‘When’s the next play?'” With that, the 52nd Street Project was born. Mr. Reale ran it for 18 years; today it is run by an executive director, Carol Ochs, and an artistic director, Gus Rogerson.

Children enter the program at 9, 10, or 11 years old, and many stay with it through high school. The first course is Playmaking, in which the children write plays for adult actors to perform. Later they take acting. In addition to after-school classes, there are summer trips to the beach, where children work one-on-one with adults to create two-person plays. The final two years of the program culminate with the teenagers putting on a Shakespeare play, which they take “on tour” to Europe. (For years, the group went to a chateau in the south of France; more recently, they have gone to Harrow, the British boarding school, and a manor in Debenham, England.)

At this point, some of the early participants are old enough to have children in the program, and others have joined the board or volunteer themselves. Shirley Rumierk is now on the board and volunteers in the Smart Partners program, which provides academic tutoring. She said the program inspired her to become a professional actor, as well as a world traveler. “It was my first time ever abroad,” Ms. Rumierk said of the trip to France, which she took with the project when she was 15. “It opened my eyes. Afterwards, I applied to all sorts of scholarships to go abroad with other programs.”

The actors who volunteer find the experience uniquely gratifying. “I feel I do some of my best work there, in the kids’ plays,” the actress Frances McDormand, who has been volunteering with the program since its beginning, said.

James McDaniel, best known for his role on “NYPD Blue,” said he found acting in the children’s plays a wonderful release. “Most of the time when we work we’re under a certain kind of emotional and physical pressure to perform well,” Mr. McDaniel said. “In this situation, the only obligation you’re under is to support the kid.” The plays also have “a totally unique voice, because [the kids] don’t know the boundaries that we set for ourselves when we grow up.”

Ms. McDormand said she was initially ambivalent about the program moving into grander quarters. The current office is a mere cubby by comparison, but a homey one, with a big kitchen table, where children often hang out in the afternoons doing homework.

“The clubhouse, though crunchy and falling apart and inadequate for our needs, was part of the community,” Ms. McDormand said. She worried that, with the move, the neighborhood would “lump us in” with the new fancy restaurants and condos. But Ms. Ochs convinced her it was a good move. “She said: ‘The kids aren’t going to get to live in this building, but they’re going to own a part of it. We’re giving them a place to be proud of in one of the buildings that’s changed the neighborhood.'”

Ms. Rumierk said she believed the neighborhood’s transformation made the project’s mission more crucial than ever.

“People forget that in Hell’s Kitchen there are still plenty of people who don’t have the resources to see a Broadway show or have experiences like a playwriting or an acting class, or to go away for a weekend,” she said.

“There’s still a lot of low-income housing, more toward Tenth and Eleventh,” she added. “That there’s something like the project, where you can feel at home and welcomed, is so important.”