Under the direction of its founding director, Nina Vance, the Alley achieved a national reputation in the 1950s. New York City architect Ulrich Franzen and his associate Keith Kroeger, working with George C. Izenour and Bolt, Beranek and Newman, designed the Alley to contain an 800-seat thrust stage theater (in the windowless portion of the building abutting Smith Street), and the 300-seat Arena Theater in the basement beneath the entrance lobby at Texas Avenue and Louisiana Street. Franzen and Kroeger slotted a driveway from Texas Avenue through the ground floor of the building past the lobby, a spatial homage to the narrow, midblock passage through which patrons entered the Alley's first performance space and from which its name derives.