Palace of Culture: Andrew Carnegie’s Museums and Library in Pittsburgh

359 Pages·2011·9.91 MB·English

by  Robert J. Gangewere

Palac e
of Cultur e
A John D. S. and Aida C. Truxall Book
P a l a c e
o f C u lt u r e
Andrew Carnegie’s Museums and
Library in Pittsburgh
robert J. GanGewere
University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
copyright © 2011, University of Pittsburgh Press
all rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of america
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Text design and typesetting by Kachergis Book Design
library of ConGress CataloGinG-in-PubliCation Data
Gangewere, Robert J. (Robert Jay), 1936–
Palace of culture : andrew carnegie’s museums and library in Pittsburgh /
Robert J. Gangewere.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8229-4397-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8229-4397-2
1. carnegie Institute—History. 2. carnegie library of Pittsburgh—History.
3. Pittsburgh (Pa.)—Intellectual life—20th century.
4. Pittsburgh (Pa.)—History—20th century. 5. carnegie, andrew, 1835–1919.
I. Title. II. Title: andrew carnegie’s museums and library in Pittsburgh.
as36.P79G36 2011
069.09748'86—dc23 2011020990
For my wife, and first reader, Linda

Contents
Preface ix
acknowledgments xv
1 The carnegie Years: “Pittsburghers Knew I Was
One of Themselves” 1
2 Building a Palace of culture: “I Felt That aladdin
and His lamp Had Been at Work” 25
3 The High command—a century of Governance:
“Men capable of His Own Zeal” 63
4 carnegie Music Hall: “Music, Sacred Tongue
of God” 91
5 carnegie library of Pittsburgh: “Free to the People” 107
6 carnegie Museum of art: “The Moral Mission of art” 129
7 carnegie Museum of Natural History:
“Museum Science” 173
8 carnegie Science center and Buhl Planetarium:
“Popular Science” 245
9 The andy Warhol Museum: “He Harvested Ideas
from everything” 265
10 In Summary 287
appendix: Interview Subjects 291
Notes 295
Bibliography 311
Illustration credits 315
Index 319

PrefaCe
The story of andrew carnegie’s Palace of culture has many themes, from
changes in american museums and libraries in the twentieth century, to
changes in art, technology, and science, and to Pittsburgh’s own remarkable
rebirth from a dirty mill town into one of the nation’s most livable cities.
Generations of people, in Pittsburgh and the United States, and internation-
ally, have been influenced by carnegie’s remarkable Institute and library.
This is a rare story about the myriad ways that one cultural institution
shaped the life of a city and a region, a story whose roots lie in a singular
experiment in bringing middle- and high-class culture to the masses in a
city notably isolated in western Pennsylvania, without the richness in the
arts and sciences that the great east coast cities were developing. Pittsburgh
was for many years a microcosm of america, tucked away in the mountains
of western Pennsylvania, and in that regard a kind of laboratory Petri dish,
where one might see over the course of a century “the higher things of the
spirit,” as carnegie phrased it, develop and grow on their own.
as I wrote Palace of Culture, I realized that I had to think more broadly
and deeply about the museums of carnegie Institute and library that I
knew so well. as the editor of Carnegie Magazine for over thirty years, I
could have simply recast much of what I knew. I was steeped in the culture
of carnegie Institute and library, knew the familiar institutional stories,
and at first thought my primary challenge would be organizing informa-
tion. But this presumption was faulty for several reasons.
It was a mistake to think that carnegie library, founded in 1895, and
carnegie Institute, founded three months later in 1896, were only about
110 years old. collectively, all the institutions whose stories I was starting
to tell had about five times that amount of history: carnegie library was
110, carnegie Museum of Natural History was 110, carnegie Museum of
art was 110, and carnegie Music Hall (perhaps no longer an equal partner,
but with its own powerful history and presence) was 110. each institution,
then, had more than a century’s worth of accomplishments and memories.
ix