"When I first saw the space, in the summer of 2001," says Jane Lang, a lawyer turned producer turned arts center maven, "it was so bad. It smelled, it leaked. It was, in a word, disgusting."

Today, that same space, the site of the old Atlas movie theater at 1333 H St., NE, in a neighborhood that was once a Washington thoroughfare, is home to Lang's dream, the Atlas Performing Arts Center, which is rising from the ashes toward its completion date of 2006. Not a face-lift or a makeover, the Atlas Performing Arts Center is a total transformation. In just 18 months since the groundbreaking, it is already, as one young dancer recently put it, "so not disgusting."

Up and operating are three dance studios facing H Street that are leased to the Joy in Motion Dance Center, a longtime dance presence in the Washington area. Passers-by line the windows to watch the school's dancers in a space once occupied by a Safeway and, before that, a wig factory. In addition to the dance studios (which have rubberized floors for kinder and gentler practicing), finished spaces include two lab theaters used by multiple organizations, including the Atlas' original tenant, ACTCo, the African Continuum Theatre Company, the District's only professional African-American theater group. The works in progress are truly ambitious; still, Lang is quite sanguine about her odds of opening on time.

The finished parts of the big picture: one fixed-seat theater for 276, in the old Atlas movie theater space, and one 250-seat, flexible theater that can be reconfigured to suit different productions and directors; a café; dressing rooms; a green room; a piano room; a stage manager's office; shops for both production and costume; a laundry room; a large trap room; and lower-level offices for use by the Center itself, as well as for lease to other arts organizations.

At first glance, Jane Lang might seem an unlikely angel of the arts, but closer inspection yields a high-reaching idealist. A former law partner at Steptoe & Johnson, Lang left the firm in 1986 to form Sprenger and Lang with her soon-to-be husband, Paul Sprenger, also a litigator specializing in plaintiff class-action suits involving civil rights. In 1997, after their firm had won several very large verdicts and settlements, Lang began to withdraw from the practice of law. Following the lead of her father, the New York philanthropist Eugene Lang, she and her husband formed a family foundation to promote the arts.

By 2001, having left the firm, Lang turned to another passion, the theater, and produced Leaving the Summerland, a musical. When it won a Helen Hayes award for set design, the recovering lawyer began to think about starting a small theater, and started looking about for a site. That quest led her to a wreck of the Hesperus named Atlas.

"I was taken to see several places, all of which were unsuitable, and then I was shown the Atlas." Her first impression: way too big and way too beat up. "But then I woke up the next morning with a vision of something that would marry all the elements of my career, all the values that I have both inherited and developed over the years, and something that could be a legacy gift." That was the beginning of the Atlas Performing Arts Center, where Lang and Patrick Stewart, the center's executive director, plan to make the space available for a range of artistic performances in a setting designed to be as attractive to the community as it is to the region, or, as she puts it, "a Kennedy Center for the people."

Help with the $18.5 million bill for the 58,000-square-foot facility has already come from some familiar Washington names. The Sprenger and Lang Foundation started things off with a grant of $2.75 million, and various areas of the Center have been named for Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer, Phillip L. Graham, Diane and Norman Bernstein, and Reuben and Arlene Mark. Larger gifts have come from the Cafritz Foundation and the Kiplinger Family Foundation.

The producing role of Lang and her company, Tribute Productions, has become "… very small, and I am now just another arts partner of the Center," along with ACTCo, Joy of Motion, The Washington Chorus, Dance Place, the Washington Performing Arts Society, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and others. Lang's main job these days is president of the Atlas board (her husband is the treasurer), and though she wouldn't mind staging something else—like the world premiere of Beyond Glory, the one-man show featuring her brother, actor Stephen Lang, which she did last year—she is well aware that those dreams will have to be deferred until the Atlas is fully functional.

In the meantime, Lang gets more and more deeply involved in the H Street Northeast community, where the rising of the Atlas, Phoenix-like, has already had an economic impact. Two years ago, housing prices in the area had soared near the half-million mark; by May 2005, they were closing in on $650,000. Lang's involvement in the neighborhood is so apparent that one suspects that in addition to being a community-based arts center, the Atlas will also be an arts-based community center.

When dancer-choreographer Debbie Allen cut the ribbon at the grand opening in March, the marquee of the Atlas spelled out its name in bright lights for the first time since 1974. Among the crowd was a prominent Washington attorney who had grown up during the neighborhood's days as a vibrant commercial corridor. Phyllis Thompson, a partner in Covington & Burling (and now vice chair of the Atlas board), recalls, "When I spent several months back in 1984 working at the Neighborhood Legal Services office almost next door to the Atlas, virtually all of the stores and shops I remembered from my childhood were gone. It's been a very long time since it was a treat to 'go out on H Street,' but I predict with excitement that the opening of the Atlas Performing Arts Center will go a long way toward restoring H Street to one of Washington's liveliest corridors."