David McCullough Interview

A big part of life for me was the Carnegie Museum Library complex, a natural history museum, art museum, library, and concert hall, all under one roof. The building itself conveyed the idea that all these things went together, there were no dividers. You walked from the library into the big hall with a plaster model of the Parthenon and the facades of great buildings from Europe. Around the corner were birds and dinosaurs. Upstairs were the paintings from the permanent collection and visiting exhibitions.

As a kid, twelve years old or so, I could get on the streetcar and go by myself, go see the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, go to the library. The architect Louis Kahn said a great city ought to be a place where a young person gets an idea of what he might like to do with his life. Well, I certainly did in Pittsburgh. Willa Cather wrote her first stories right near where I grew up. Dreiser lived in Pittsburgh. Stephen Foster was a native son. There were the great musical traditions of the Czechs and Germans and Poles of Pittsburgh. Everybody talks about diversity now. If you were a kid riding the streetcars in Pittsburgh in 1945, you knew about diversity. You heard three or four languages being spoken. You smelled the garlic. You saw the foreign newspapers.

The combination of first-rate public schools and the freedom we had to explore the city on our own—unsupervised—well, it was great. I loved growing up there. But I had never seen the ocean and, I think most of all, I wanted to get to New York. Maybe it was seeing so many movies.

-David McCullough Interview Paris Review