faces of the future - Illuminating Engineering Society

PROJECT
Bunches of purple glass grapes affixed to tapered
pilasters seem to burst with light now that they have been
cleaned and relighted from behind with LEDs.
Photo: Whitney Cox
and Louis Comfort Tiffany were
good friends, and Tiffany’s manufacturing
firm received the commission
to create the theater’s light fixtures.
When the theater opened, the
lighting was the talk of the town.
As Arthur David noted in Architectural
Record in 1908 about the
then-Stuyvesant Theatre (later
renamed the Belasco): “. . . lights
veiled in tinted glass, whose color
is borrowed from the decorations
against which they are placed: the
soothing color scheme in which
the whole interior is floated-amber,
golden brown, dusty gray, orange,
and faded green blues.” Observers
pointed out that Belasco had the
theater decorated and illuminated
as if he were inviting guests into
his living room.
STAGE REVIVAL
Coordinating the renovation’s
lighting and power upgrade was Ted
Jacobi, engineering project manager
for The Shubert Organization.
He describes the lighting in the coffered
ceiling as inset “lay lights”—22
octagonal panels of Tiffany glass.
“They were part of the first phase of
the restoration, two years ago,” says
Jacobi. Suspended from the ceiling
are 22 Rosette-style fixtures on long
pendants, which beam uplight onto
the elegant palace-like geometric
pattern overhead. Although many
of the originals were missing, they
were replicated from the surviving
fixtures by Femenella & Associates,
Branchburg, NJ-based restoration
specialists. “We replaced the existing
11-W incandescent lamps with
40-W incandescents to enhance the
visibility of the ceiling,” says Jacobi.
Three of the 13 Tiffany stainedglass
fixtures on the orchestra and
mezzanine balcony ceilings that
were missing were also replicated to
exactly match the glass of the original
fixtures. “The originals, which
had been in storage for 40 years, had
eight sockets each which I assumed
held 25-W lamps, or 200 watts per
fixture, for a total of 2,600 watts,” Jacobi
says. “We installed a new bracket
with four 6-W LEDs in each, or 24
watts each, a savings of 2,288 watts.”
During LD+A’s tour of the Belasco,
Thomas Stein, project manager
for The Shubert Organization, noted
that the new lighting on all of the
theater’s levels accents a very warm
palette of earthy colors comprising
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