Thomas White Lamb, the man hired to renovate the Loew’s Grand Theatre into a modern, Art-Deco movie palace,  is remembered as one of, if not the, 20th century’s best theatre designers.

Born in Dundee, Scotland, Thomas W. Lamb came to the United States at the age of 12. He studied architecture at the Cooper Union school in New York and initially worked for the City of New York as an inspector. His architecture firm, Thomas W. Lamb, Inc., was located at 36 West 40th Street in Manhattan, New York.
Lamb achieved recognition as one of the leading architects of the boom in movie theater construction of the 1910s and 1920s. Particularly associated with the Fox Theatres, Loew’s Theatres and Keith-Albee chains of vaudeville and film theaters, Lamb was instrumental in establishing and developing the design and construction of the large, lavishly decorated theaters, known as “movie palaces”, as showcases for the films of the emerging Hollywood studios. His first theater design was the City Theatre, built in New York in 1909 for film mogul William Fox. His designs for the 1914 Mark Strand Theatre, the 1916 Rialto Theatre and the 1917 Rivoli Theatre, all in New York’s Times Square, set the template for what would become the American movie palace.

Thomas W. Lamb biography, from the Cooper-Hewitt. Visit their page to read more and to see their collection of his drawings and connected works.

(credit: American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America)