Pittsburgh: Cathedral of Learning's Nationality Rooms

University of Pittsburgh Nationality Rooms (November 2018) - Unique Sightseeing Opportunity
My spouse and I visited The University of Pittsburgh’s Nationality Rooms on a Saturday morning in early November 2018. Because my spouse is an alumnus of Pitt, we have visited the Nationality Rooms before, although not during the last decade. The Nationality Rooms allow self-guided tours, which last 1.5 hours and cost $4 per person. During the traditional school year (late August until late April), tours are available only on weekends; however, during the summertime, you can tour the rooms on Mondays through Saturdays from 9:00 am until 4:00 pm (with the last tour departing at 2:30 pm). Tours on Sundays run from 11:00 am until 4:00 pm.
The Nationality Rooms are located in the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. The 1930s Gothic Revival Cathedral stands 535 feet tall, boasting the claim of the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere. The Cathedral contains over 2,000 rooms and 2,000 windows spread over 42 floors. The four-story-tall vaulted lobby area contains a massive Commons Room that is used as a general study area. (During winter finals, the various wood-burning fireplaces are reportedly lit to provide a homey place for students to hit the books.)
The first and third floors of the Cathedral house the Nationality Rooms, so named because they represent the various ethnic and cultural groups that occupy the Pittsburgh area. Not only do the rooms serve as an homage to those nationalities, but they are actually used as classrooms as well (therefore, you can only tour the rooms on weekends when school is in session). In addition, from mid-November until mid-January, the rooms are decorated for the holidays in ways traditional to each country. At the present time, there are 27+ different rooms to tour (including English, Scottish, Russian, German, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish, Swiss, Korean, French, African, Armenian, Austrian, Chinese, Czechoslovakian, Greek, Hungarian, Indian, Irish, Israel, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Yugoslav), with other rooms in the proposal and planning stages (including Filipino, Finnish, and Iranian). To host a room, each group had to submit a design, raise funds to construct it (most rooms took 3 to 10 years to complete and cost between $370,00 and $750,000), acquire materials, hire laborers, then decorate it appropriately (sometimes with authentic artifacts). Visitors can enter to investigate all but two of the rooms; you can only peer into the Early American and Syrian-Lebanon rooms through glass doors. Rooms are kept locked when not in use, so when you pay your tour fee, you receive a key to unlock/re-lock the rooms. Visitors also receive a self-guided tour map and a headset that is used to explain each room while you are standing inside.
Although we have had the good fortune to physically travel around the world, we still feel that the Cathedral of Learning’s Nationality Rooms are a huge international treasure at the University of Pittsburgh. (In fact, a University employee thinks they should be added to the UNESCO list.)































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