Andrew Carnegie continues to give and take from the City of Pittsburgh and its people even today, nearly 100 years after his death. Many consider the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Central Library the crown jewel of his gifts to Pittsburgh. As a self-educated man, Carnegie borrowed books from the private library of local iron mogul Colonel James Anderson and constantly expressed the importance of what he called “life-long learning” (Holt). Due to his past experiences with this library and the successes it brought him, Carnegie placed the construction of public libraries at the forefront of his philanthropic ventures after making his fortune. The first of what would become a plentitude of Carnegie Libraries was in built in Scotland, the land of his birth, and the second in Braddock, the heart of his steel empire (Holt). Carnegie’s third library was placed in Allegheny City, which would later go on to become part of the City of Pittsburgh, located across the river from the Downtown area (Holt). The fourth library to be gifted by Carnegie was the Central Library of the Carnegie Pittsburgh Library System, located in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood (Holt). Oakland has since blossomed into the educational heart of the city, no doubt thanks in part to Carnegie with his role in the creation of both the library and his’ and Mellon’s eponymous Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie was eventually responsible for the construction of over 2,500 libraries worldwide according to Marilyn Holt, Head of the Pennsylvania Department at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
The Central Library in Oakland has had a specifically large and positive impact on the Pittsburgh community throughout the years. One of the brightest aspects of this impact is the Main Library’s Teen Space. Holt says the Teen Space has been around officially for over twelve years, but an area devoted to adolescent and young adult literature has existed for much longer called the James Anderson Room. Since becoming the Teen Space, this area of the library has evolved into something much more than some common library stacks storing teen fiction. In its present form the Teen Space is devoted exclusively to teens. The idea of the Teen Space, according again to Marilyn Holt of the Pennsylvania Department at the library, is to provide a comfortable and safe place for teens, especially after school to read, work on homework (both together and alone), foster creativity, and grow intellectually. The space also offers a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction writing oriented towards teens with popular selections as well as staff-picks. Along with these more predictable functions the Teen Space goes even further, offering special events throughout the year and an “alternative homecoming” called Fantastic Beats, where students can come “dance alongside magical creatures and full-scale art installations” as they “take over the Library after dark” according to their Facebook page (Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh). These features along with the peachy and helpful personalities running day-to-day operations in the Teen Space make it an ideal place for young Pittsburghers to spend their evenings learning and creating.
Pride and Pain
The efforts of the people at the Carnegie Library Oakland Teen Space help shape the lives and minds of young people for the better, in the most formative years of their lives. The institutions left in place by Carnegie are an attempt to leave a positive legacy and change the communities affected for the better. The positivity bestowed by the Teen Center and the Library in general to the area at large is undeniable, however characterizing Carnegie’s impact as solely positive would be a gross injustice to those who have been negatively affected and continue to be negatively affected today. Carnegie has gone down in history as one of the largest steel barons, as well as one of the greatest philanthropists in history, and this is no accident. Positive aspects of this legacy demand themselves to be seen as one walks down the streets of Pittsburgh with towering, masculine structures like the Library and interconnected Museum of Natural History while the negative pieces seem to drift further from the public eye as time moves the city further and further from its days as a steel town. In the current year, the majority of Pittsburghers who have ever worked a day in a steel mill have passed on, retired, or are nearing retirement and naturally the days of heavy industry continue to fade from collective memory with each passing day.
When the only everyday interaction most people have with Carnegie’s name is returning a book or a Saturday trip to the Museum, it becomes easy to forget that the mills that literally and figuratively built these community pillars created some of the worst working conditions in human history. Explosions and injury at the mills were commonplace and took countless lives before anyone once stopped to consider the long-term effects of inhaling the smoke of smoldering hot metal. A scene from author Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace shows a fictionalized version of a tragedy at a mill not at all unlike Carnegie’s.
As he approached he could hear the roar of that rushing flame and the rattle of things falling on iron roofs, the coke and stock blown out of the furnace by the explosion. The furnace itself, except for its majestic plume and rakishly tilted canopy, looked unchanged, undamaged. Red dust began powdering his face and hands. The running men converged around the back of the furnace, by the stockyard. Kracha pushed through and scrambled down the iron stairs. In the cavelike stockroom the skip hoist had just been lowered. A few of the men on it could still stand. Some of the others were so horribly burned that Kracha could only hope they were dead. (Bell 51)
Residuals
Such horrors are almost unimaginable today, and perhaps this too contributes to the forgetting of the past. It is misguided however to think such calamities ended with the decline of these mills. The economic and housing conditions that came with the rise of the mills produced defacto segregation of both racial and socioeconomic groups to the most polluted areas of the city directly next to mills. These groups, particularly Blacks and Eastern Europeans, were further devastated by the departure of the same mills that built these conditions. A total loss of livelihood forced many into low-paying jobs and reduced standards of living. Many were forced to leave their homes, friends, and the community they built, though even this choice was only given to those that could afford to leave, and ethnic lines effectively controlled who could afford to do so. Formerly vibrant neighborhoods historically inhabited by Pittsburghers of color, such as Braddock, continue to battle these consequences along with health problems created by pollution even to this day.
Pittsburgh photographer Latoya Frazier visually presents these problems in her seminal work The Notion of Family. Frazier’s stunning photos show chemicals and pollution present in her and her mother following an ionic foot detox procedure. The pharmacist immediately knew they lived downwind from the mills. There are no plaques bearing the names of the great steel giants along the polluted rivers or alongside the abandoned homes in once beautiful neighborhoods. Placing the entirety of this blame for the consequences of the heavy industry of Pittsburgh squarely on Carnegie’s broad shoulders would be inaccurate as well as disingenuous. To deny Carnegie his share of accountability regarding the destruction of social as well as environmental ecosystems in the neighborhoods would prove to be equally misleading. Thus, understanding Carnegie proves to be a tightrope walk. The consequences of forgetting the past are far more grave than the contrary, and to truly understand it is important to acknowledge this dichotomy. Carnegie’s mark on Pittsburgh can never be tallied up neatly as uniformly good or bad—there is no simplifying.
Tomorrow's Promise
While the direct consequences of Carnegie’s steel works continue to recede into the shadows of his mighty philanthropic empire, it becomes more and more important to remember what was given up and what was taken away. Carnegie’s legacy is both complex and dualistic: though tremendous amounts of hardship have come from his doing, perhaps one day the snowballing culmination of the good can help offset the suffering of those who have been hurt the most and their descendants. Contributions like Carnegie’s library systems and the Teen Space in Oakland are but small drops in the vacuous and largely idiosyncratic bucket of paying back what has been taken and destroyed. The Teen Space however will continue to help mold great young minds and the benefits that these adolescents may one day instill on the world could prove to be incalculable. Hope for a future beyond Carnegie’s negative legacy must therefore be a hope in future generations who can best reap the rewards of these positive gifts bestowed by Carnegie.
Works Cited
Bell, Thomas. Out of This Furnace. 1st ed., Little, Brown and Company, 1941.
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Alternative Homecoming: Fantastic Beats and Where to Find Them. Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/events/376043092828151/. Accessed 7 April 2018.
Frazier, LaToya Ruby. The Notion of Family. Figure 2. 1st ed., Aperture Foundation, 2016, pp. 110–110.
Holt, Marilyn Cocchiola. Tour of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 19th January 2018, Main Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 4400 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213.
Yeager, Brady. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Teen Center. Figure 1. 2018, digital photograph.