Braddock Carnegie Library
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Braddock Carnegie Library holds a singular distinction: it was the first Carnegie library built anywhere in the United States. Andrew Carnegie dedicated it in person on March thirtieth, eighteen eighty-nine, in the steel town where his Edgar Thomson Works had made him a fortune. Carnegie intended the building to be far more than a place to borrow books.
Members of the Carnegie Club paid a fee to use a swimming pool, a bowling alley, and a nine hundred sixty-four-seat music hall under the same roof. The architect William Halsey Wood gave it an eclectic medieval look in brick. The library was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-three and named a National Historic Landmark in twenty twelve.
It stands today in a neighborhood still working to recover from the collapse of American steelmaking, a monument to the moment Carnegie gave his adopted country its first taste of what would become about twenty-five hundred public libraries worldwide.
