Carnegie Music Hall, Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, too, has a Carnegie Hall.  Except that we pronounce the name "Carnegie" as the man himself pronounced it: carNEGie.  (In New York, they insist on pronouncing it CARniggy.) Until last Sunday, I had never been inside the Carnegie Music Hall, which is attached to the stately library and museum complex in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  This is the foyer.  There's a statue of Andrew Carnegie at one end of the room, not pictured here, and a large fireplace at the other end.

And this is the balcony above the foyer.  I'd have gotten better photos of the beautiful marble work, but I got chased out of the balcony by an employee who told me the area was closed.

When you enter the music hall at the main level, it appears small, even a little cramped.  If you sneak up to the third level (which was also closed, but who's gonna tell?), the place opens up and appears enormous.  We were there for a Chatham Baroque concert titled "A Corelli Christmas."  There weren't many recognizable Christmas tunes, but it was an outstanding performance, as always.

 

I gotta say, the place has just a whiff of neglect about it, benign, grandiose, ornate neglect.  The window frames seem to be rotting out of their casements.  There are cobwebs.  And strangely, there are two women's restrooms on the main levels, but there's only one men's room, and it's all the way down in the basement.  This could be one of the reasons the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra relocated from this venue to Heinz Hall, downtown.  Ah, but this is Pittsburgh; glorious neglect is sort of our thing.

Actually, the Pittsburgh area has three of these grand music halls attached to the big marble libraries that Andrew Carnegie gifted to the various communities.  There's a Carnegie Music Hall attached to the public library in Homestead and another one, confusingly, attached to the way-cool hilltop library in the town of Carnegie--which is one of my favorite cities in the Pittsburgh region.  That's to say, there's a Carnegie Music Hall of Pittsburgh, a Carnegie Music Hall of Homestead, and a Carnegie Music Hall of Carnegie.  I've never been to the one in Homestead, but the one in Carnegie is smaller than this one and less ornate.  Still, it's a pretty cool venue.  When Andrew Carnegie gave all these libraries and concert venues to the towns here in Steel Country, the factory workers famously said, "Libraries are nice, but how about safer working conditions and more time off?"  I heard an estimate that about 30 people died every week in Carnegie's steel factories, but that number may be apocryphal.