In 1901, the Scottish philanthropist/industrialist Andrew Carnegie Foundation gave $5.2 million to New York City for its libraries across the five boroughs. This started a remarkable project that would go on to build 1,680 Carnegie libraries across the United States and another 800 plus in Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the world. In NYC, Carnegie gave to the boroughs according to population. Since Queens was the least populated borough at the time, they got the least amount of money. The Queens Library trustees were able to go to Carnegie himself and present a plan that gave them more money, enabling the library to build seven of the eight libraries planned for the borough. Carnegie paid for the buildings, but the city would have to buy or acquire the land, buy the books, and provide for maintenance and upkeep, in perpetuity. Carnegie helped set up the library commissions and boards.
One of the largest Carnegie libraries can be found on Division Avenue west of Rodney Street. We can be grateful Robert Moses aimed his steam shovels just west of the site, as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway passes by in a trench just to the west of the library. Ground was broken in 1903 on this first of 21 Carnegie libraries constructed in Brooklyn, which had joined NYC five years before. It’s designed in a Classical Revival style and you can’t tell from this clos-up photo, but two wings jut out, giving it the appearance of an open book. When it was built, Williamsburg still had an h, like Pittsburgh does.
One of these days I’ll get around to featuring every remaining Carnegie library in NYC of which there are 67, though I may have to be lazy and use Street View. Interior photography is a crap shoot. Some libaries would welcome it, while in others I’d be out on my ear.
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4/25/24
3 comments
Actually, there was a period around the turn of the 19th century, when Pittsburg experimented with losing the “h.” They since regained it.
The H was added to many names during World War I to make them look Scottish and not German. But does anyone say Pittsburra ?
Brooklyn’s own Wilson Avenue had been Hamburg Avenue, and they could have just made it Hamburgh. Or to be real American, why not Hamburger Avenue. Yum.
There’s a “Pittsburg”, CA, and I like telling people that it was originally settled by migrants, heading west from PA, who didn’t want to carry the extra weight of the “H” cross-country with them.