Photo copied with permission by the Carnegie Library
of Homestead
A Lasting Community Vision:
the Carnegie Library of
Homestead
by Bob Holder
After building the stately, sprawling Carnegie library complex in Oakland in 1895, Andrew Carnegie looked to the steel towns where he made his fortune. The first of his libraries, in nearby Braddock, was already almost ten years old, and in Carnegie's mind, just didn't do enough for the community.
He unleashed his architects on a gently rising slope in Munhall, next to Homestead. The community was unusual, for he owned the whole thing and his minions sold lots to his steelworkers. Munhall is also where the famous Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 and Carnegie's reaction to it, led to the deaths of more than a dozen strikers. Perhaps the library was to be a peace offering in a town where many owed their living to Carnegie Steel, but thought the man might be the devil himself.
Carnegie had his architects design a French Renaissance-style chateau in buff-orange brick, which is fronted, these days, by a grassy park of stately sycamores and a white gazebo. Instead of just a library, though, the Carnegie Library of Homestead houses an athletic wing with a swimming pool, gymnasium with basketball courts and indoor track. The pool became famous when several of its swimmers represented the United States in the Olympics of the 1920s and 1930s. One of them, Anna Gorman, swam in the Los Angeles Olympiad in 1932. You'll still find her, at age 84, swimming laps at the pool. The east wing of the building houses an acoustically perfect music hall that seats more than a thousand patrons. It is the home of the River City Brass Band, judged by critics as the finest brass band in the world.
The library itself is a mixture of the ancient and modern. It has that old library smell: warmth, dryness, binder glue and paper. It has high ceilings and no air conditioning, but scattered about are the networked computers linked to the OPAC and the world through the Internet. Staring down from the walls is Carnegie himself, along with murals of steelworkers making steel. The library is a wonderful combination of library and memorial to the steel industry, which has all but disappeared from the Steel Valley. For those who need to research the steel industry or Steel Valley, the library has an excellent collection of local and labor history.
How did Andrew Carnegie end up in Pittsburgh, making steel and giving away libraries? Carnegie's family moved from Scotland to Pittsburgh's North Side as a way of working its way out of poverty. The twelve-year-old boy began working full time, but his employer, James Anderson, allowed him to borrow freely from his 400-volume library, since there was no public library in the community. Along with reading up a storm, he worked like crazy, winding his way up through a railroad company, then finally starting his own steel company making railroad rails. He later sold Carnegie Steel as the foundation for what became United States Steel.
Carnegie later credited reading with giving him a foundation for success and came to believe that the free dissemination of information was the basis for a healthy, prosperous democracy. He went on to donate the funds to build and stock almost 2,500 libraries throughout the English-speaking world, as well as thousands of music halls and pipe organs.
The Carnegie Library of Homestead remains a testament to his single-minded passion. Preparing for the library's centennial two years ago, the Steel Valley community gathered funds and restored the entire building to its original glory. The controversial Carnegie would be proud that after a century it is still a center of community life.
For more information, see www.clpgh.org/ein/homested.
Bob Holder, an MLIS grad student, has lived near and visited the Carnegie
Library of Homestead for the last twenty years.
Publication of the Department of Library & Information Science
University of Pittsburgh
135 N. Bellefield Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Last updated October 26, 2000