Lighting designer Abe Feder died on April 24 in Manhattan. He was 87. One of the most distinguished LDs in Broadway history, he was also a major architectural lighting designer. Born in Milwaukee, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh to study architecture but stayed only two years. He worked at Chicago's Goodman Theatre as an LD, then moved to New York, where his first Broadway credit was Trick for Trick in 1932.
Among his New York theatre credits were Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), New Faces of 1936 (1936), I'd Rather Be Right (1937), The Cradle Will Rock (1938), One Third of a Nation (1938), Angel Street (1941), The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Winged Victory (1943), Out of This World (1950), The Immoralist (1954), The Boy Friend (1954), The Flowering Peach (1954), The Wisteria Trees (1955), Inherit the Wind (1955), My Fair Lady (1956), Orpheus Descending (1957), Time Remembered (1957), Camelot (1960), Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), and The Night of the Iguana (1985). He was lighting supervisor for the WPA Theatre Project and production coordinator and lighting designer for American Ballet Theatre's first tour. His inventions include the reflector bulb, which he created with Clarence Birdseye, and the sealed beam reflector lamp.
With his company, Lighting by Feder, he was a lighting designer and/or consultant for the 1964 New York World's Fair, Expo '67, the San Francisco Civic Center, Rockefeller Plaza, the Israel National Museum in Jerusalem, and the Minskoff Theatre in New York, besides the lighting for all theatres in the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Among his most renowned later projects was the relighting of New York's RCA Building in 1986. He was also the founding president of the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD).
Feder is survived by his brother, Theodore. On April 28, the lights at Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building were turned out for one hour as a memorial tribute to him.