Personal Data

Clarence Sumner Luce was born on June 10, 1852, in Chicopee, the son of Augustus Luce and his wife, Clarissa E. Clapp.

He married in 1874-1875 to Alice Louise Francis (b. Nov1851 in CT).

Clarence Luce died on March 22, 1924, in Emerson Hill (Staten Island) New York.

Career

Clarence Luce was a draftsman and later an architect in the offices of Gridley J. F. Bryant in the early 1870s. By 1880, he had opened his own offices in Boston, and by 1885, he had moved to New York.

He was an early exponent of the Queen Anne style and specialized in residential work. Two of his earlier works were his remodeling of a carriage barn at Mt. Vernon and Brimmer Streets into the “Sunflower House” (1878) and the Edward Stanwood house on High Street in Brookline (1879). Roger Reed, in his “Building Victorian Boston: The Architecture of Gridley J. F. Bryant,” notes that “although these projects were undertaken at the time when Luce and Bryant shared an office, there is no evidence that Bryant was involved in either.”

Luce also undertook commercial assignments, especially after moving to New York. Among his works were the Holyoke Opera House (1878-1879), the Renaissance Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York (1891), and the Somerset Hotel (1901) on West 47th Street in New York.

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