Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland reopens after $9 million renovation

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct earlier information provided by museum officials regarding the renovation cost.

After eight months of renovations, the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland will be reopening its doors, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh announced Friday.

The renovated space boasts the addition of air conditioning, new lighting and sound systems, 1,530 larger and more comfortable seats and a completely resloped floor.

“We actually changed the pitch of the floor to make it more ADA compliant, more accessible to wheelchair-bound visitors,” said Steven Knapp, president and CEO of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

“I think gives the whole hall a warmer, more intimate feeling,” he added.

Andrew Carnegie wanted the music hall to be the center of musical culture in the region. It dates back to 1895, and while the renovations focused on bringing in new amenities and updated infrastructure, it was done with deference to the historic aspects of the building.

This allowed experts from the Museums of Art and Natural History to get involved.

“We had people lovingly going through all the decorations that were there that had to be touched up,” Knapp said. “They were very carefully touched up respecting the original colors, making sure everything was done with precision.”

Conservators from the Museum of Art helped to match historically accurate paint colors and carefully clean the hall’s decorative panels.

“The preparators of fossils in the Museum of Natural History are skilled at making plaster castings to fill in missing bones in skeletons of dinosaurs and things like that,” he said. “They actually did some of the work where there was broken molding or broken plaster decorations. They were able to reshape them and match them to the original.”

Adding updated lighting to the mix, the space looks totally refreshed.

“What you’ll notice is everything is brighter, everything is clean,” Knapp said. “… The brightness of it just brings out all the original design even more effectively.”

Some seating capacity was lost, but the installation of the new chairs is a huge benefit for visitors.

“It’s making the seats wider themselves, but it’s also widening the aisles — that’s part of the accessibility aim here,” Knapp said.

In addition, the seats offer an opportunity for lovers of the Carnegie Music Hall. With the “Take Your Seat!” campaign, Carnegie Museums are raising money by allowing donors, with a gift of $600 to $3,000, to put a name on a seat of their choosing. The name can be theirs or that of someone they wish to honor.

For the first time in its nearly 130-year history, the music hall will have air conditioning, which Knapp said will open up exciting possibilities.

“Since 1905, it’s been cooled by a large wooden fan that belongs in a museum, but not as part of the infrastructure,” he said.

Having the ability to effectively cool the space will allow it to be used for programs during the summer.

“It opens lots more opportunities for rethinking all the ways in which we can make the music hall a real center of conversation in the community about important issues and a real focus of cultural activity,” Knapp said.

The renovations, which cost about $9 million, have been in the works for several years, and are part of an overall effort by the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh to serve the region.

“The museums are traditionally thought of as places where people come to look at collections,” Knapp said. “But we’re engaging the community much more actively and in a much more collaborative way with what we call ‘co-creating a thriving Pittsburgh for all.’ It’s one of our goals.

“And that has to do with opening our doors and making everything we do more accessible to all residents of our region. We really do serve the community.”

The Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland hosts music concerts, lectures, performing groups from local universities, graduation ceremonies, weddings and other events.

“It’s the original home of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and we’re looking forward in June to having some of the symphony musicians return to that stage,” Knapp said. The first concert by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra was in 1896 in the Carnegie Music Hall.

The renovations met no major unexpected challenges, Knapp said, though it was quite an undertaking, including years of architectural plans, choosing designs, and the scope of the job, itself.

“As I said, it included changing the actual pitch of the floor so it’s not as steep as it was. You can imagine the kind of work that goes into something like that — changing the angle of the slope,” Knapp said.

“We were really able to enhance the beauty of the original design without changing them, and do all of that without sacrificing any of the acoustical value of the music hall,” he said, calling it an acoustically perfect concert hall.

Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures will return to the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland on Monday night, with the event “Tracy Kidder in Person.”

To learn more about the “Take Your Seat” campaign, visit carnegiemuseums.org/seat-campaign.