Carnegie Hall nearly fell to the wrecking ball before a violinist intervened
When the New York Philharmonic announced it was leaving for Lincoln Center, the city's most famous concert hall looked doomed. A public campaign led by the violinist Isaac Stern saved it, and the main auditorium now bears his name. Built with walls up to four feet thick, Carnegie Hall has outlasted almost everything around it.
Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, paid for the building, which went up between 1889 and 1891 under the plain name Music Hall. It was meant as a shared home for two New York choral and orchestral societies. The architect, William Tuthill, was a relatively unknown 34-year-old, and his amateur cello playing and singing may have helped him win the job. Acoustics were entrusted to Dankmar Adler of Adler and Sullivan, an experienced designer of theatres. Because steel frames were not yet common, the hall rests on heavy masonry, and its reddish Roman brick is trimmed with terracotta in a modified Italian Renaissance style.
The complex holds three auditoriums arranged in an L. The largest, the Stern Auditorium, packs 2,790 seats onto five levels, and reaching the top balcony means climbing 137 steps above the main floor. Below street level on Seventh Avenue lies the 599-seat Zankel Hall, while the intimate Weill Recital Hall on 57th Street seats 268. Offices fill the upper storeys.
The New York Philharmonic played in the main hall from 1892 until 1962. The Carnegie family owned the building until 1925, when it passed to the developer Robert E. Simon and later his son. Its opening had helped create an artists' quarter along West 57th Street, full of studios and apartment buildings for musicians, but that neighbourhood has largely given way to the luxury towers known as Billionaires' Row.
Renovations in the 1940s and 1980s reshaped it, lowering the lobby to street level and adding stage wings and dressing rooms that the original design lacked. Today it is a National Historic Landmark with no resident orchestra. Instead it runs its own programme of roughly 250 performances a season and rents its stages to visiting groups, classical and popular alike.
Source: Carnegie Hall
