Leopold Damrosch dreamt. In his imagination, he envisioned a magnificent concert hall, the likes of which had never been seen in New York. Millionaire Andrew Carnegie didn’t even think of it, even though he gave much of his money to charity. He preferred to support scientists and build libraries because he thought progress and education were important. Music did not. Damrosch never met Carnegie, yet it was Carnegie who financed the fulfilment of his dream. Damrosch’s son Walter made it happen, and in 1891 Carnegie Hall opened its doors.
Born in what is now Poznan, Poland, Leopold Damrosch was not only a talented musician, but also a skilled entrepreneur, and if someone was hurt, he could easily take care of them, because he had studied medicine at his parents’ request. He only learned to play the violin on the side, but he was so attracted to music that after graduating he decided to pursue a career in music.
In Europe, he had built a successful career and a renowned name for himself, but in 1871 he did not hesitate too much when he was invited to America. With his wife and two sons, he crossed the pond and began to build not only a new life, but also a new career.
He loved choral singing and orchestras, and founded the Oratorio society and the Symphony society, both of which struggled to get going. They had to perform wherever they were invited, even though the venue was totally unsuitable for, for example, choral singing.
Not that there weren’t halls in New York, but there was something wrong with every one of them. One was too small, one was too big, one was only for operas, one was only for solo singing. Some had extremely poor acoustics, others could not coordinate rehearsal schedules with performance dates. The list of problems with which Leopold Damrosch had to cope was long.
He wanted a hall for his group. One where their music would sound the way it should. He convinced everyone around him of the need for a new hall, but died in 1885 without a glimmer of hope. But the hall did not die with him.
Leopold Damrosch Persuading Andrew Carnegie
Leopold had a son, Walter. He was also a conductor. Although he was only 23 at the time of his father’s death, he was a responsible man who realised how much the two musical groups meant to his father. He could not let them fall apart, so he bravely stepped into his father’s shoes and carried the many responsibilities that his father had once carried on his shoulders until his death.
He also became conductor of both groups, which was remarkable considering his young age, and like his father he was in favour of a new concert hall, although he had already seen from watching his father that it was a battle with windmills.
Then he met two interesting people on an ocean voyage. Although at first glance he had nothing in common with millionaire Adrew Carnegie and his wife Louise, the trio became friends on board the ocean liner. Against all odds, the acquaintance grew stronger and blossomed over the years.
Andrew Carnegie loved choral music, but not so much that he thought about a hall for it. Fortunately, he had married Walter shortly before they met. Louisa loved music and had supported the Oratorio Society for many years, but Walter found in her a great ally. As soon as they had become close enough, he began to tell Carnegie about his father’s dream.
He did not deny that there were halls in New York, but the Metropolitan Opera was hardly suitable for opera, and not at all for other kinds of music. The Academy of Music was similarly unsuitable, and was old to boot, and the concert hall in the showroom of the city’s main piano manufacturer, Steinway, was no better, although it was large enough.
Andrew Carnegie knew all these halls, but he thought they were just fine. Watler didn’t give up. He brought up the new, versatile hall so often that Carnegie finally had to start talking about it. Not that he was a miser, he had no trouble opening his wallet, but he didn’t really care about music enough to give his money to it.
He felt that she had to “earn” it herself, i.e. that it was her listeners, not her patrons, who had to give her money. But Walter kept repeating his idea, year after year, until he had fired Carnegie’s imagination to the point where he envisioned not just a concert hall, but a space that would be ideal for all events, including non-musical ones, and would serve “all good purposes”.
In fact, Carnegie Hall was not the first music hall he built. He was the reason Pittsburgh, Allegheny City and Braddock had theirs, but he had to give money for them because he had to give something back to the cities and they wanted concert halls. They were a kind of gift, and he thought of Carnegie Hall as an investment.
Leopold Damrosch Had Complication after complication
It was complicated from the start. He bought land for the hall in the then rather unpopular area of 57th Street and 7th Avenue. There was no artistic enthusiasm there and there was no party. The view was of stables, coal strewn across the yards, and apartments where nobody lived.
Some prominent musicians were convinced that the project was doomed because of its location. Why would an audience go to a concert or other event in a neighbourhood full of bars, where the atmosphere is soaked with dust coming from the forges? Opponents of the site have begun to question out loud whether New York really needs another venue.
When the district was better scrutinised, it was discovered that Carnegie had not bought the plots out of the blue. In some places, however, there was an artist or actor who wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle of the more luxurious part of town, and all the signs were that the district might develop in the future.
Then they had a dispute over the choice of architect. Andrew Carnegie chose 34-year-old William Tuthill, a renowned amateur cellist and singer who had never designed a concert hall before, but was secretary of the Oratorio Society board. Those involved in the project could not believe it. Carnegie not only had a wide network of acquaintances, he had done similar projects before and knew the importance of a good architect. But he chose Tuthill. The two men had met years before and Carnegie reportedly valued him for his knowledge of acoustics.
It was a top priority in the design of the hall. Tuthill made it a condition that the shape or size of the land on which the hall would stand should not determine the shape or size of the building itself. He specified that each sound must be transmitted exactly 30.40 metres to be heard by the audience. He stressed the importance of the shape of the hall and the composition of the adjacent surfaces in influencing the sound, and that both must be taken into account. He also wanted them to study sound waves in order to understand how to achieve the most excellent acoustics. He paid attention to every little detail.
Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie founded Music Hall. For him, the Music Hall was an investment, and he expected it to be self-sustaining and make a substantial profit. He loaned the company $300,000 in exchange for 90 per cent of its shares, appointed himself to the board of directors, and added William Tuthill and Walter Damrosch to the board.
Once the wheel was in motion, things happened with incredible speed. By 1889, the Board had already purchased what it needed and in November estimated that the construction of the Hall, including the purchase of the land, would cost $763,532.25.
In the meantime, William Tuthill consulted everyone he could find. He sent a questionnaire on what to look out for when building a concert hall to the directors of hundreds of concert halls around the world to find out as many details as possible and to get as many ideas as possible about what affects the sound in different types of building.
He was under a bit of pressure. He was expected to build a hall that would far surpass all the others. With more and more international music stars performing in America, they needed the best hall to attract them to New York. Fortunately, he realised that he had more experience in music than in architecture, so he hired other architects to advise him and listened to them.
The Music Hall Corporation has finally started building a concert hall. The main building, with six floors, was made of caramel and earth-coloured bricks and a mansard roof was added on top to make room for another auditorium.
Since Tuthill was primarily interested in acoustics, he didn’t bother much with the appearance of the building, but in the end it looked more like a bank or an office building built in the style of the Italian Renaissance than a cultural temple. It was easy to miss it on sight.
The ground floor auditorium had 2800 seats, with a smaller 1000-seat auditorium below. The attic hall never came to life. As the cultural centre had to support itself, the attic roof was demolished and replaced by accommodation rooms, as they were called at the time, to be rented out and to cover the hall’s costs at a profit.
Great Peter
Music Hall, as New York’s new cultural palace was originally called, was inaugurated on 5 May 1891 and was filled with concerts until 9 May. The star of this so-called music festival was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He wrote home that “below the line … he is a much bigger star here than in Europe”. Tickets for all the concerts were sold out, and people were crowding outside the hall looking for someone who would be willing to sell their ticket with a better seat.
“Here I am pampered, honoured and entertained by everyone,” Tchaikovsky wrote home. Yet most of the time he spent in New York, he wished he was somewhere else. His letters and diaries are full of complaints. He disliked the overcrowded schedule, the strangers who harassed him in the hotel, the ladies who booed him during breaks, the bad food, although the meals were plentiful, as he reported, the hard performance of the second-rate pianist who had been hired for his concert, and so on.
Nevertheless, he had fun in the company of Andrew Carnegie, “a rich old man with $30 million who looks like Ostrovsky”. Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was a Russian playwright.
After the festival closed on Sunday, Tchaikovsky was invited to dinner at the Carnegie. Tchaikovsky stood open-mouthed. He could not believe that “this ultra-rich man lives no more luxuriously than anyone else … Carnegie remained modest and simple. He is never one to turn up his nose – he inspires me with unusually warm feelings, perhaps because he himself is full of kindness towards me.
Throughout the evening, he showed me his affection in a very special way. He shook my hand and shouted that I was the uncrowned, but still true, King of Music. He hugged me (he didn’t kiss me, men don’t kiss here). He stood on his toes and raised his arms high in the air to express my greatness. Finally, to the amusement of all assembled, he imitated my conducting. He did it so seriously, so well and so accurately that even I was fascinated. His wife, an extremely simple and lovely young lady, also showed her affection for me in every way. All this was pleasant and at the same time kind of embarrassing.”
The Hall opened to great success, but Carnegie’s plan for the Corporation to run the Hall by covering its own costs was doomed to failure. In Europe, such halls and orchestras were generously subsidised by the government. Tchaikovsky was quite shocked to learn that the hall was ‘built with the money of music lovers’ and that these ‘same rich music lovers maintain a permanent orchestra. There is nothing like that here!”
The Hall of Culture was originally called simply Music Hall, after Boston’s great concert and lecture hall. But in London, the phrase music hall or music hall had a different meaning. Foreign musicians refused invitations because they believed that only inferior artists performed in the New York hall. So the name was changed to Carnegie Hall. Carnegie later insisted that he was in Europe when the committee made the decision and that he never approved it.
He didn’t really need a commercial. By the end of the 1880s, he had “given a great deal of money to charitable and educational purposes”, as it was written in 1887. Given how much he had, he could have spent more, but he could not. Although in January 1890 he was said to be worth more than $14.8 million at the time, 90 per cent of his wealth was tied up in stocks, bonds and partnerships. None of which he could realise.
Artist studios
But Carnegie Hall was built anyway, and in 1895 two more colonnades were added to cover the hall’s operations through rent, although later the studios’ rent was subsidised to make the colonnades a community that brought artists together. One of them had 12 floors and the other 16, with a total of 170 studios. One was for teaching only, the others were also artists’ homes.
The basic idea was that painters, poets and teachers of dance, music and drama should live and work under the same roof. This time, the architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh was called in to help, and he knew exactly what artists needed, but the ceilings of many of the studios were twice as high as those of ordinary rooms, the acoustics were exceptional and the windows looked north.
These spaces were called the Carnegie Art Studios and were occupied by people who gave the environment a very special character. For example, the famous Isadora Duncan had her ballet school in Studio 160. She stopped living there in 1927. She did not move out.
At the time, the New York Times and other newspapers reported on the unusual accident. An eccentric American dancer, 50-year-old Isadora Duncan, was walking through Paris with a rainbow-coloured scarf wrapped around her neck, its long strands fluttering far behind her. When she tired of wandering the streets of Paris, she got into a hired convertible to take her to her hotel. She did not notice that a piece of her scarf was left on the outside of the car.
The driver took off and the car was gaining speed when suddenly the joker got tangled in the rear wheel of the car. The scarf did not come off, as it was wrapped tightly around her neck, but first pressed her against the seat and then dragged her out of the car. Before the driver realised that something was wrong and managed to stop the car, he had dragged the unfortunate dancer, who was hanging by her scarf, several metres behind him. At the scene, paramedics were only able to determine that she had suffocated and died of asphyxiation.
Thus, the American who has delighted dance lovers around the world with her dancing has made history not only for her dancing, but also for her accident. Doctors have called the survival of involuntary scarf-puffing Isadora Duncan Syndrome.
In other circles, Isadora Duncan is best known for her Carnegie Hall studio. She has taught and trained George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham, a pioneer of modern dance. The future First Lady of America, Betty Ford, was also a pupil of hers. When Graham moved to New York, Betty went with her, but after two years she gave up, because Graham expected dancers to be totally dedicated to dance, and Betty was interested in other things.
The game was taught on the eighth floor by Wynn Hendmann , the dean of the Stanislavskian teachers. His students included Mira Sorvino, Jeanne Woodward and Denzel Washington. Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and Robert Redford also learned the play in the same building.
Choreographer, dancer and ballet dancer Jerome Robbinson and composer and long-time music director of the New York Philharmonic Leonard Bernstein bumped into each other in the corridor. They started chatting. In one of their studios, they came up with the idea for a musical, which became On the Town.
Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso was so impressed by the acoustics of his studio 826 that he recorded his first album for the American label Victor talking machine company there.
Actors Marlon Brando and Spencer Tracy have also found a home there. Mark Twain used to smoke his pipe in the Artists’ Club, so it is not surprising that many artists have spoken decades later of the extraordinary atmosphere in the studios and corridors. It was like a mill. The world’s greatest artists played first downstairs, in the hall, and then upstairs, in the studios.
One resident described the hustle and bustle as being like something out of a Degas painting. After class, the corridors were flooded with singing girls who had come to rehearsals. Elsewhere, a music teacher was singing. Across the corridor someone was making violins. They all lived together in a kind of artistic commune.
The end of a bohemian fairy tale
Sometime in the 1980s, tenants started either moving out or dying of old age. Fewer and fewer tenants were left, and in 2007, when 29 tenants were left, the decision was made that they had to move out. The empty spaces had previously been converted either into offices for the not-for-profit Carnegie Hall Corporation, which runs the Hall, or into sterile new living quarters. The corporation decided to forcibly evict 29 tenants because it needed the space to expand its music institute.
Forty years earlier, in the 1960s, the fate of Carnegie Hall hung in the balance. John D. Rockefeller III and other New York City stockbrokers wanted something extraordinary for the new Lincoln Center, to turn it into the best centre for classical music. They persuaded the New York Philharmonic to move out of Carnegie Hall.
For a long time, they were the most loyal and the biggest tenant. Without them, the survival of the Hall was impossible. So they decided to demolish Carnegie Hall and replace it with a 44-storey office block.
Just days before demolition was due to start, tenants of the artist studios organised by violinist Isaac Stern persuaded the city authorities to buy the hall and lease it to the newly-formed non-profit Carnegie Hall Corporation.
The lease agreement had specified that the intended use of the hall and studios could not be changed, but now it was clearly possible. They wanted to bring children to the studios to learn music, to hold family concerts in the larger studios and to organise workshops for professional musicians in the remaining studios.
The news that artists’ studios will not be what they once were has turned into a public spat between New York celebrities. Actors Susan Sarandon and Robert De Niro have also pledged their names in favour of the artists. All of them insisted that the environment is of the utmost importance for artists because it is their home and because of the influence of the people who live there. Others stressed that artists’ studios are America’s cultural heritage and should be protected.
Carnegie Hall has spent a lot of money on lawyers, spending as much as it has earned in rent over the decades. The corporation won, the artists lost.
The last two occupants
The poet Elizabeth Sargent lived for 46 years in her two-storey studio with a balcony on the 9th floor. She was the last person to be forced to move. She said in 2010, when she was leaving, at the age of 80, that she did not feel as if she was leaving the space, but as if the space was leaving her.
In 1964, she came because she saw an advertisement inviting artists to live and work in Carnegie Hall. Not everyone could get in, of course. The new neighbours needed a recommendation, and the literary critic Malcom Cowley wrote one for her.
Marlon Brando lived below, Leonard Bernstein on the same floor, and the artists’ club where Mark Twain sat was just down the corridor. For her, it was a magical place where artists had freedom and could develop their skills.
When the corporation announced in 2007 that it would demolish the commercial and residential studios, it took up the fight. When everyone else had already fallen, she still refused to move out. She had made a name for herself in Carnegie Hall, she said. She is more famous for living there than for her work.
She had no idea how she would work elsewhere. For her, this was home and it was a place where she felt safe. Her husband, an alcoholic, had abused her severely before she managed to escape him, so the studio was also a refuge for her to work in peace.
In the last months before the move, she no longer had peace. There was a construction site around her. Her breast cancer was in remission, but she was emotionally and physically exhausted. Here and there, she had soup cooked for her by 98-year-old Editta Sherman, famous for her portraits of famous actors, musicians, athletes and others. Alongside Sargent, it was she who resisted eviction to the last.
The two women were quite different: Sherman enjoyed public exposure, Sargent guarded her privacy like a treasure, but they got on famously, as other tenants used to. Even before the eviction, they had exchanged clothes, when they were practically neighbours.
Others gave up earlier, although the 83-year-old pianist Donald Shirley persevered for a long time. After three years of wrangling, he moved out in June 2010. His departure was spectacular. The piano was too big to go through the door, but it was lowered by crane from the 12th floor.
This was my only home, said a dejected Sargent as she left. When she moved in in 1964, she was paying $188 a month rent for a two-storey studio with a balcony. When she left, it cost her $337 a month to live there.
The corporation found new accommodation for the former tenants, close by, but it was clinically clean, just the kind of accommodation they didn’t want. Sargent was only evicted from her real home when she was offered $2 million and the noise from the construction site was truly unbearable. But she could not work in her new home near Carnegie Hall. She was bedridden for several years until she died in April this year, aged 96.
Editta Sherman, also known as the Baroness of Carnegie Hall, lived to an even older age. She was 101 when she died in 2013, and 37 when she moved into Studio 1208 in 1949 with her husband and five children. At the time, she thought her new home was cute but too small, but she lived there for 61 years.
It turned out to be just the right size, given that she regularly managed to throw celebrity parties in it. She was a sort of big Italian mother, constantly cooking chicken soup in her darkroom, as she was described, even though she came from Philadelphia. She herself lived to be 101, and her husband died at the age of 50, after being blinded and weakened by diabetes. She brought her five children to bread on her own, even though she was considered Andy Warhol’s muse.
In 2010, she had to move out. She got a new apartment in Central Park South. She didn’t like it and again it was too small. Where to put all her photos? She borrowed a loan so that she could at least have an archive in Carnegie Hall until the last one. Even though she was 98 when she moved there, she went there every day. She couldn’t get used to losing her only real home.
The poor man who became a millionaire
Andrew Carnegie learned what it was like to lose one’s home at a young age. He was born in Scotland in 1835, but his family had to sell everything they owned because they were involved in the movement for workers’ rights. When it collapsed, his parents set sail on a long ocean voyage from Glasgow with 13-year-old Andrew and 5-year-old Tom.
They landed in New York. Andrew was completely overwhelmed by his first encounter with the city. He was enchanted by the crowds and the excitement, but he didn’t enjoy it for long because they soon had to push on towards their final destination, the Allegheny. There, his father started a business, but it soon collapsed and they were penniless again. Andrew, aged 13, had to start earning his own money.
For $1.2 a week, he worked from morning to night in a cotton mill, carrying bobbins to the workers. A year later, he was hired by the local telegraph company. As he taught himself how to use the equipment, he was promoted to telegrapher. Quite skilled in his field, he easily got a job with the Pennyslvania Railway Company and became a supervisor at the age of 24.
Although he hasn’t seen a school desk since the age of 12, he hasn’t been unschooled. He couldn’t go to school, but he could read. One of the townspeople, Colonel James Anderson, opened a library for local boys who had to work. It was pretty much the only place they had access to books. And so Andrew read and read and read, educating himself and later saying, “I decided from my own early experience that there was no better way to spend money usefully than by establishing public libraries.”
But at 24, he was earning barely enough to survive. That is, until the superintendent of the Pennyslvania Railway Company told him that they were going to sell 10 shares in Adams Express. Andrew’s mother took out an American version of a mortgage and raised $500. Her son bought the shares and soon the dividend money started flowing in.
He then bought a stake in Woodruff sleepin car comapnjy, which introduced the first sleeping car to the Americans. He had to take out a loan to buy the shares. The business was so good that he ended up buying the whole company.
His business interests expanded and by the age of 30 he was involved in iron mining, steamships, iron and oil, and eventually steel. He turned Carnegie Steel Company into the largest steel company in the world. He became a millionaire, although he was not really rich until 1901, when he sold his steel company for $480 million.
He retired at the age of 66. Now he really had time for charity, even though he had been giving money to charity since 1870. He founded 2,509 public libraries, 1,679 of which were built in America. He spent around $55 million on libraries alone.
He supported libraries not only because of his youthful experience, but also because he believed that in America, anyone with access to books and a thirst for knowledge could self-educate and become successful, as he had done. But because he was an immigrant, he also believed that foreigners in America needed to learn about the cultural history of the country, and that libraries could help them to do that.
In 1911, he established his last foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, or Carnegie Corporation, dedicated to “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding”. He gave it $135 million to promote education and international peace.
The Foundation was initially intended for Americans only, but then he wrote: “The situation on Earth is changing irreversibly, and no wise man will commit the trustees to one and the same path, purpose or institution for all eternity … They will best follow my wishes if they use their own judgment.” Thus they were also given the green light to operate abroad.
Although he tried to be poor when he died, he still had $30 million when he died in 1919, having already distributed $350 million. This 30 million also went to the corporation. For example, because he was a firm believer in peace, he gave $10 million for the ‘abolition of international wars’. To date, no one has come up with a formula to achieve this.
