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.)
