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Eight months ago, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh work crews took over Oakland’s nearly 130-year-old Carnegie Music Hall. They ripped out all 1,900 upholstered seats, tore up the floorboards, and lugged in a small building’s worth of scaffolding.
This past Monday, the Music Hall hosted one of its first public events following the venue’s first renovation in decades, a Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures talk by author Tracy Kidder. And you could really see the difference.
The revamped hall is brighter, shinier and airier. The brightness comes courtesy of the new, ruby-red carpeting on all three levels, and the room’s freshly rewired lighting. The shininess is largely due to crews’ painstaking repair and hand-cleaning of the elaborate tapestry of lyres, garlands and gilded curlicues that adorn the theater’s walls and decorative panels. (Think cotton balls soaked in vinegar.) And the airiness owes much to the new, wider seats the Carnegie installed — 1,530 of them, about 20% fewer than before.
Once the lights went down, the place looked about the same as ever — although those with acute hearing might find that it sounds a little crisper now, thanks to the all-new audio system. Meanwhile, even bisected left to right by plush, deep-purple drapes three stories high, the hall’s stage remains huge; you can see how it served as the original home of the Pittsburgh Symphony, way back in 1895, the year it opened as a part of the massive complex including the museums of art and natural history, not forgetting the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
So why the renovation?
Kidder was there to discuss “Rough Sleepers,” his timely new book about the folks doing street medicine for homeless people in Boston (with a guest appearance by the book’s central figure, Dr. Jim O’Connell). PAL holds 10 mainstage events a season, and since fall had occupied the much smaller Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. But the Music Hall is busier than patrons of a flagship tenant like Arts & Lectures might know.
Over the decades, it’s hosted performers from Luciano Pavarotti and Ella Fitzgerald to David Byrne and Norah Jones. Carnegie Mellon University books it for shows by its orchestra, and philharmonic and jazz concerts. Schools and universities stage graduations and other events there, and so do corporations and foundations. And of course the Carnegie itself activates the historic hall for in-house events, like one of my own favorite evenings there, with Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson.
But Melissa Simonetti, the Carnegie’s director of construction and project management, said the space hadn’t been renovated since the 1970s. Grime had dulled the luster of all those decorations. Moreover, visitors had long complained of the seats’ compact Victorian dimensions, and Simonetti said the new seating reflected a preference for comfort over quantity.
Another problem was the absence of air-conditioning, which left the Music Hall too hot to occupy several months each year. That’s been remedied, too. As one usher excitedly said
Monday of the revamped hall, “It’s got air conditioning and heating!”
Accessibility was another goal, said Simonetti. The ground floor’s slope was lowered a bit, and spaces for wheelchairs were added on all three levels.
And for the sake of aesthetics, next time you go, check out the sconces along the back wall of the first balcony. Forty-three of them were restored using molds of the originals sculpted by Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontology preparators, using skills more usually brought to bear on the bones of dinosaurs and ancient mammals.
In all, it was a $9 million project that Simonetti called “the highlight of my career.”
The makeover should continue to benefit Pittsburgh’s arts scene for years to come.
