Smithmeyer & Pelz designed Andrew Carnegie’s first library donation—though, as the people of Braddock are proud to point out, it was the second Carnegie Library to open, since the smaller Braddock library took less time to build. The same architects had designed the Library of Congress, which turned into a quagmire from which they had a hard time extricating their careers intact. (The library part was a piece of cake; it was the Congress part that was impossible to manage.) Unlike the classical Washington library, though, this one was done in a Romanesque style, which architects seem to have instinctively hit on as more suitable for muscular industrial Pittsburgh.
After the library was damaged by a lightning strike, the Carnegie Library moved out and built a smaller branch library northward on Federal Street. This building now is the Museum Lab of the Children’s Museum.
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