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CARNEGIE HALL, New York City

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in New York City located at 57th Street and 7th Avenue.

Built by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1890, it is one of the most significant venues for classical as well as popular music in the United States, known not just for its beauty and history but also for its fine acoustics.

Carnegie Hall has its own artistic programming, development, and marketing departments and presents about 100 performances each season; it is also rented out to performing groups. It has no resident company.

Carnegie Hall is actually made up of three distinct structures and presents a fairly confusing internal structure. There are three auditoriums: the Main Hall, the Recital Hall and the Chamber Music Hall.

ARCHITECTURE OF CARNEGIE HALL

Carnegie Hall was designed in a revivalist brick and brownstone Italian Renaissance style by William Burnet Tuthill. Although Tuthill's is not a familiar name, the success of the building is largely due to his design.

Carnegie Hall is one of the last large buildings in New York built entirely of masonry, without a steel frame; however, when several flights of studio spaces were added to the building near the turn of the 20th century, a steel framework was erected around segments of the building. The exterior is rendered in narrow "Roman" bricks of a mellow ochre hue, with details in terracotta and brownstone.

The foyer avoids contemporary Baroque theatrics with a high-minded exercise in the Florentine Renaissance manner of Filippo Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel: white plaster and gray stone form a harmonious system of round-headed arched openings and Corinthian pilasters that support an unbroken cornice, with round-headed lunettes above it, under a vaulted ceiling. The famous white and gold interior is similarly restrained.

HISTORY OF CARNEGIE HALL

Carnegie Hall is named after Andrew Carnegie, who paid for its construction. It was intended as a venue for the New York Symphony Orchestra, which was favored by Carnegie. Construction began in 1890, and was carried out by Isaac A. Hopper and Company. Although the building was in use from April 1891, the official opening night was on May 5, with a concert conducted by maestro Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Work on the building continued until 1897.

The hall was owned by the Carnegie family until 1924, when Carnegie's widow sold it to a real estate developer, Robert E. Simon. When Simon died, his son, Robert E. Simon Jr. took over. Soon, the way Carnegie Hall was being run didn't work out, so he offered it to the New York Philharmonic. They declined, as they were going to move to the Lincoln Center.

By 1960, with the New York Philharmonic on the move to the Lincoln Center, there were plans to demolish the building and replace it with a commercial building, so Simon sold the building. He ended up using that money to found the city of Reston in Virginia, RES being his initials.

Under pressure from a group led by Isaac Stern, the city of New York bought the site in 1960 for $5 million and leased it to a nonprofit corporation. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. The building was extensively renovated between 1983 and 1995, by James Polshek, who became better known through his post-modern planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.

The renovation was not without controversy. After work done in 1986 there were complaints that the famous acoustics of the hall had been diminished. Although officials involved in the renovation denied that there was any change complaints persisted for the next nine years. In 1995 the cause of the problem was discovered to be a slab of concrete under the stage. The slab was subsequently removed. Despite the landmark status of Carnegie Hall, plans for a commercial building were not entirely scrapped. In 1987-1989, a 60-floor office tower, named Carnegie Hall Tower, was completed next to the hall on the same block.

In June of 2003, tentative plans were made for the Philharmonic to return to Carnegie Hall beginning in 2006, and for the orchestra to merge its business operations with those of the venue; however, these plans were called off later in 2003.

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