Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette Robert Gangewere, standing in the foyer of Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland, has been a force in raising awareness of the historical significance of Pittsburgh's three rivers and its bridges. He has retired as editor of Carnegie magazine and plans to write a history of the institution. Click photo for larger image.

Presidents and museum directors come and go, but for the past 31 years Robert Jay Gangewere has been a Carnegie Institute constant.

No more.

The longtime editor of Carnegie Magazine is putting himself out to pasture, to graze on the institution's 109-year history.

"You know when it's time," Gangewere said. "What could be better than working for three decades at a place and then being given a chance to write about what it all meant?"

Gangewere, who looks two decades younger than his 67 years, will write the first comprehensive history of Carnegie Institute for the University of Pittsburgh Press.

A Queens native who wrote his doctoral dissertation on "The Aesthetic Theory of Wallace Stevens" for the University of Connecticut, Gangewere came to Pittsburgh in 1967 to teach English at Carnegie Mellon University, staying on as adjunct professor until 2000.

Since taking over Carnegie Magazine's reins in 1973, he has interviewed dozens of Carnegie Institute leaders and staffers and researched its past. In the process, he has become the institutional memory at 4400 Forbes Ave., the go-to man when in-house questions about its heritage arise.

Gentle-mannered but passionate about his adopted city's natural and built environment, Gangewere also has been a force in raising awareness of the historical significance of Pittsburgh's three rivers and its bridges. As one of the founding members of Friends of the Riverfront, he has written, designed and produced, with the help of archaeologist Christine Davis, dozens of heritage signs for rail-trails in Pittsburgh, Oakmont, Linn Run State Park and the Great Allegheny Passage.

"I designed the signs so they can be reread and rethought about," Gangewere said. "And I tried to do images that stand up to perusal, like historic views of the town of Oakmont."

He was the local chair of the "Always a River" project, a 1991 traveling barge exhibit about the Ohio. His large-format paperback book, "The Bridges of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County," published in 2001 by Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania, is a valuable pictorial reference guide.

But the work he'll be best remembered for came during his long tenure at Carnegie Institute -- the 202 Carnegie Magazines he shepherded to production.

"I have seen four presidents, four art museum directors, six natural history museum directors, three Warhol museum directors, three science center directors and eight heads of my own department," said Gangewere, sitting in a sea of red velvet chairs in Carnegie Music Hall last week.

The cover from the first Bulletin of the Carnegie Institute, April 1927. Click photo for larger image.

To get there, you take a winding walk from his nearby office, past the music hall dressing rooms where, he offers, "Pavarotti and Bernstein prepared for performances."

"I saw Gregory Peck standing here a couple of years ago" when he did a reading, Gangewere said, looking around the gilt chamber that has lost much of its audience but none of its grandeur since its heyday as a concert and performance venue. "I've seen a lot of famous people here."

To resurrect their ghosts and others, Gangewere will tap the magazine's archives. Volume 1, Number 1, published in April 1927, featured a portrait photograph of lawyer and industrialist Willis F. McCook on the cover. McCook's Fifth Avenue mansion has been in the news this year, after a February fire led to its being offered for $1.5 million.

Seventy-seven years ago, McCook made news by donating $10,000 to Carnegie Institute to purchase paintings -- $1,000 a year for 10 years, on the provision that Samuel Harden Church, the institute's president, could get nine others to make a similar donation. McCook's gift was matched by 15 others, then doubled by the Carnegie Corp. of New York to $300,000, reported Church, who also served as editor of what was then called the "Bulletin of the Carnegie Institute."

It was, from the beginning, "the aim of this little magazine to disseminate ... information related to the activities of the Institute," Church wrote.

Always a fund-raising tool, it nevertheless soon evolved into a broader intellectual journal, publishing book and play reviews, editorializing in support of the student peace movement in 1935 and exploring new plans for the Oakland Civic Center in 1951.

In the 1980s, the magazine decreased its frequency from 10 to six annual issues but enlarged to a more graphic, full-color format. Gangewere took advantage of it to write and publish histories of the Allegheny County parks system (with fold-out map), Highland and Schenley parks and of volunteerism in the county.

But during the 1990s, as Pittsburgh's cultural scene expanded and became more competitive, the magazine's world view shrank as it focused more narrowly on Carnegie Institute's own exhibits. All of the articles in the current issue, Gangewere's last, are about museum exhibits and programs. Friday was his last day.

"This is probably the best magazine I ever produced," he said, pulling out "The Carnegie Centennial Issue" from one of five brown metal cabinets in the institute's basement. The September/October 1995 edition is packed with stories about the history, influence and significance of Carnegie Museums and Carnegie Library. Using excerpts from interviews with scholars and others, Gangewere also constructed a debate about Andrew Carnegie's reputation, illustrated with seven political cartoons published in the early 1900s.

Gangewere has donated three decades of interviews on tape to Carnegie Library's Special Collections. "Tapes are much more fulsome in what they offer you than the digested stories can be," he said.

At his retirement party Friday, Gangewere was presented with a mock, tribute-filled Carnegie Magazine. "Perhaps no one -- not even the founder -- has ever understood Carnegie Institute better, or has loved it so knowledgeably," writer Mary Brignano wrote.

As Gangewere seeks funding for his book, his former boss, communications director Betsy Momich, will take over his editing job at the magazine, with Kim Tarquinio as managing editor.

In its pages, Gangewere often treated the Carnegie Institute building itself as exhibit and artifact.

Ten years ago, when a century of Pittsburgh soot was pressure-washed from the exterior, he asked that a small, dark patch be preserved. So it was, bigger than he expected, on the side of the building facing Schenley Plaza -- a charcoal rectangle that subtly connects the building to its founder.

It's also a reminder of a conscientious man, one who made his mark within the building and very often without.