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| Free To All |
How Andrew Carnegie Built
the Architecture of American Literacy
The philanthropist covered
the U.S. in libraries between 1893 and 1919. How many survive—and the forms
they've taken—points to what kind of structures make a city center.
City
Lab: 10.28.2014 by Kriston Capps
Earlier this month, the
International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., ditched its plans to move into
the Carnegie library in Mt. Vernon Square. The last of several meetings with
the city's Historic Preservation Review Board had yielded another round of
modifications to the museum's plans to adapt the building. But the Spy Museum
had run out of time.
"We loved the
opportunity that was put forth to make a home in a historic part of the
city," says Jason Werden, communications manager at the International Spy
Museum. "It was a lot to juggle, but it was something that was going well
for a long time."
D.C.'s Spy Museum had hoped
to erect an addition, one designed by the Philadelphia architecture firm MGA
Partners with the landscape firm OLIN, that would surround the existing 1903
Carnegie library on three sides. The plan would've seen the building joined by
two glass pavilions on its east and west ends, along with glass walkways around
its north face, while adding even more space below grade.
The plan proved to be too
much for District preservationists. Yet modern glass pavilions and basement
tunneling are not necessarily out of the ordinary for a Carnegie library today.
Across the nation, the libraries that Andrew Carnegie built have been transformed
and reused as historical museums, city halls, art centers, and even bars and
restaurants, sometimes by dramatic means.
It is a testament to
Carnegie's philanthropic investment in cities—the largest in U.S. history—that
so many of these buildings are still in use. Yet no one can say exactly how
many are standing now. Despite the important roles the libraries continue to
play in towns and cities, our understanding of these buildings as a piece of
civic infrastructure is far from cohesive.
A $1 Billion Program for
Invisible Infrastructure
"It can be really hard
to tell whether a library is a Carnegie library," says Abigail A. Van
Slyck, author of Free
to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890–1920 and dean at
Connecticut College. "You essentially have to have a document. Or they
have to have named it 'the Carnegie library.' Or put it in the
cornerstone."
Between 1893 and 1919—a
three-decade run that librarians refer to as the Golden Age of the American
public library system—Carnegie paid to build 1,689 libraries in the U.S. These
seeded the DNA for nearly every American library built before the end of World
War II. That may explain in part why there is no central accounting for
Carnegie's libraries, which were built without any oversight from a formal
program or foundation: Even libraries that aren't historical Carnegie libraries
share their aesthetic philosophy. READ
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