Clarence Howard Blackall (1857–1942) was an American architect who is estimated to have designed 300 theatres[1].
He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1857. He attended college at the University of Illinois School of Architecture, graduating with a B.S. in 1877, and received training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He arrived in Boston, Massachusetts in 1882, where he was recognized for both his architectural innovations and his designs of significant Boston landmarks including the Colonial Theatre, Wilbur Theatre, Modern and Metropolitan (now the Wang Center for Performing Arts) theatres.[2]
Blackall was a senior member of the Boston architectural firm Blackall, Clapp and Whittemore, and in 1889 he helped establish the Boston Architectural College as a club for local architects and as a training program for draftsman.[3]
He designed the 1894 Carter Winthrop Building, which was the first steel frame structure in the city of Boston.[4] In addition to its innovative technology, the structure also used terra cotta trim and featured a dramatic, deep, and overhanging cornice. Blackall is also credited with designing the Copley Plaza Hotel, the Foellinger Auditorium (1907) on the University of Illinois campus, as well as the Little Building (1917)[5] at Emerson College on the site of the Pelham Hotel (1857), the "first apartment house in any city along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States" according to noted architectural historian Walter Muir Whitehill.
Opened in 1908 and designed by Blackall, the Gaiety Theatre was one of the only theatres in New England that would allow African Americans to perform vaudeville[6]. It was also the first of Blackall’s theatres to use a large steel girder to support the balcony, eliminating the need for architectural columns. Blackall was also responsible for Nathan H. Gordon's Olympia Theatre design, which opened as a film and vaudeville theatre on May 6, 1912.[7]
Blackall died in Concord, Massachusetts on March 5, 1942.