Once a steel town, Carnegie is located just six miles southwest of Pittsburgh, at the intersection of Interstates 279 and 79, and at the end of the Port Authority Transit’s West Busway.  The town was formed in 1894 when the two boroughs of Mansfield and Chartiers consolidated under a new name in hopes of encouraging philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to donate a library and high school to the new community.  In 1901 the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall (ACFL&MH) was built atop a bluff, one of only four libraries in the nation endowed by Carnegie.  The attached 780 seat music hall is still in use and was modeled after Carnegie Hall in New York.  Today the ACFL&MH is working to renovate the “Italianate” style building.

Today Carnegie is “Bursting with Culture”, boasting two ballet schools, a music academy, and three art galleries.  The original owner of the 3rd Street Gallery building in Carnegie was Struzka’s Hardware more than 100 years ago.  Since then the building has seen several uses, including a flower shop, a succession of pizza shops, and an accountant’s office.  Phil and Jean Salvato bought the building back in 1990 and have since restored it.  Now the space boasts the original hardwood floors, painted tin ceilings, colorful walls, a 3rd floor studio space, 2nd floor lofts, and an original working hand pulley elevator to move large items between floors.  The first floor serves not only as an art gallery and framing shop, but as a yoga studio as well.  Phil believes that “wherever there is art, people can prosper around it”.

Carnegie at one time had 31 churches to serve the faithful in a town of immigrants from many lands.  As the population has changed and parishes have consolidated, many church buildings in town have been restored for different uses.  One such example is the former Christ United Presbyterian Church, built in 1889, which now houses the Renaissance Gallery and Cefalo’s Restaurant & Nightclub.  The upper-level gallery space was once used for Sunday school classes, but now it holds a wide variety of paintings and several Disney animation cels (short for acetate celluloid) from several original Disney cartoons, including 101 Dalmatians and Snow White.  Pat Jander, owner of the gallery, sees these Disney masterpieces as “the only truly American Art form” because they were not influenced by European art.  Renovations of the church’s lower level into Cefalo's nightclub were completed early in 2005.

Carnegie’s third gallery, Black Swan Gallery on West Main Street, features original art and prints by local artists, especially nature and wildlife, Linda Barnicott's images of Pittsburgh and  a large selection of sports art (especially the Pirates and Steelers).  While all three of Carnegie’s galleries carry a different line of art, they work together to complement each other to bring gallery visitors to town.  

Lisa Rasmussen, owner of Eccentricities: An Eclectic Café, serves selections from a menu that changes daily from the first floor of a house that she renovated to fit her café and gift shop while she lives upstairs.  Many new retail, restaurant, and service businesses have opened in the past five years, but many more businesses are Carnegie institutions that have built the town’s stability, including Izzy Miller Furniture

Store since 1946; Hanna’s Clothing Store since 1903; Puhlman Flower Shoppe since 1908, and Carnegie Supply since 1945.  Carnegie has a long tradition of small and family-owned businesses that offer direct and personal service to the community along with a unique blend of merchandise and services, and the layout and design of the retail space lends itself to a continuation of this tradition; aside from banks and a few non-retail office businesses, there are few chains or franchises in town.

The Historical Society of Carnegie PA is busy collecting all the memorabilia of this busy town in its Main Street building, including such information as yearbooks and report cards, records from Superior Steel company (one of the town’s largest employers), and a “Miniature Main Street” model built by a long-time resident, depicting Main Street in the heyday of the 1940s and 50s.

Carnegie also hosts a three-day “Arts & Heritage Festival” on Main Street the weekend after Labor Day. It’s become known as the “Carnegie Blues Festival” because it’s one of the biggest free blues festivals in the eastern United States, and a visitor can enjoy pierogies, haluska, and hot sausage sandwiches offered by churches and organizations in town while they watch four stages of local and regional blues artists through all three days.

In addition to Carnegie’s Community Development Corporation, whose mission is to alleviate and prevent community blight and deterioration, Carnegie Renaissance was formed in January 2003 to help Carnegie businesses and residents connect in order to increase the town’s social capital.  The organization hopes to position the town as a cultural area, and to promote the town as a whole by combining the resources of its cultural and social assets with the restaurants and social outlets.  Bernadette Kazmarski, one of the founders of the organization, believes that communication builds everything.  She and several others have worked to promote communication and interaction through gallery walks, business mixers, and other activities. 

The organization also organized a banner sale, where local businesses could purchase a turquoise banner with their name and “Welcome to Carnegie” to display on the town’s light poles, and an Adopt-a-Planter campaign for businesses, organizations, residents, or employees in the businesses in town to donate a small sum to plant and care for flowers in the large concrete planters along Main Street and have a plaque with their name affixed to their adopted planter.

Links

Carnegie Renaissance

Carnegie Community Development Corporation

Andrews Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall

(photo credit: Bernadette Kazmarski)

Carnegie at Dusk

Andrew Carnegie Free Library

Pa Pa J's Restaurant

Cefalo's Restaurant & Nightclub

"Pastel, 2003" by Bernadette Kazmarski

Paddy's Pour House

Eccentricities: An Eclectic Café

(photo credit: Bernadette Kazmarski)

Carnegie Festival