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Images courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System
Cathedral of Learning
Chancellor Bowman introduced the concept for the Cathedral in 1925 as the “Tower of Learning”, but John McMahon, a Scots-born draftsman, muttered instead that it was a “Cadral of Larnin’” and the name stuck. Tradition holds that Mary Schenley’s father put up the Nationality Rooms in the Cathedral’s ground floor specifically to lure Mary back to Pittsburgh.
Also special are the two dozen newer nationality rooms conceived in the 1920s by sociologist Ruth Crawford Mitchell as a as a means of linking the university with the cultures of Pittsburgh steelworking immigrant families. They range from 5th Century BCE Athens through 8th Century China, Renaissance Italy, and Napoleonic France. In years past, University of Pittsburgh students and faculty would recite the whole of James Joyce's Ulysses in the Irish room every Bloomsday (June 16th). Mitchell supervised the completion of the Irish room in 1957, after which came a 30-year slump during which no new rooms were added. This jam was broken by the Israel Heritage room after which a dozen new rooms followed. All of the rooms are interesting, but particularly enchanting are the Greek and Swedish rooms and the Syria-Lebanon room, which was once the library of an eighteenth-century Damascus villa.
Also special are the two dozen newer nationality rooms conceived in the 1920s by sociologist Ruth Crawford Mitchell as a as a means of linking the university with the cultures of Pittsburgh steelworking immigrant families. They range from 5th Century BCE Athens through 8th Century China, Renaissance Italy, and Napoleonic France. In years past, University of Pittsburgh students and faculty would recite the whole of James Joyce's Ulysses in the Irish room every Bloomsday (June 16th). Mitchell supervised the completion of the Irish room in 1957, after which came a 30-year slump during which no new rooms were added. This jam was broken by the Israel Heritage room after which a dozen new rooms followed. All of the rooms are interesting, but particularly enchanting are the Greek and Swedish rooms and the Syria-Lebanon room, which was once the library of an eighteenth-century Damascus villa.
- Pittsburgh: A New Portrait by Franklin Toker
