Carnegie Alumni Center has served Grove City College well. In the decades since it opened in 1902, it has been a library, gymnasium, concert venue, lecture hall, office building, military outpost, and meeting and banquet space.
It was originally a Carnegie Free Library, one of hundreds of such facilities funded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie during the gilded age to advance education and culture. The building was initially gifted to the College and the town of Grove City and featured a gymnasium in the basement and a music hall on the third floor in addition to space dedicated to the library. MORE>>
In the early 1900s, Carnegie Hall was in the heart of Grove City College’s campus, surrounded by Ivy Chapel, Recitation Hall, Founders Hall, the original Colonial Hall, the aptly named Music and Physics buildings, Ketler Gym, and College Field. It remained the College library until 1954, when the Henry Buhl Library was built, and used as a music hall until Pew Fine Arts Center was completed. Carnegie was then adapted for other uses, including offices and the College’s ROTC program. As upper campus was developed from the 1930s to the 1980s, the buildings of lower campus were mothballed and demolished until, eventually, only Carnegie and Cunningham House, the oldest building on campus, remained.
In the early 21st century, a move was launched to revive lower campus. The construction of the new Colonial Hall student apartments in 2006 brought student life back to the College’s original footprint. A few years later, Carnegie, which by then had seen much better days, was renovated and expanded to become the Carnegie Alumni Center, a showplace for the College to welcome alumni and visitors to campus.
Today it houses the offices of Advancement and Alumni Relations, the College Archives, the Communications office, and the Colonnade meeting and banquet space. The new entryway features a display of hand-painted organ pipes from the original Carnegie organ, which date to 1907.
Carnegie Alumni Center is both a link to the College’s past, when growth was fueled by the interest and investments of those who profited from the industrial bounty of western Pennsylvania, and symbol of the College’s stewardship of its resources and commitment to alumni.