Peter Rachleff is a retired labor history professor, an often-outspoken expert on workers' struggles. Andrew Carnegie was a steel tycoon, whose union-busting ignited the violent Homestead strike near Pittsburgh in 1892 that claimed 16 lives.
Odd bedfellows, perhaps, separated by a century. But both men share the ardent belief that storytelling can improve communities — and the tale of their unlikely partnership is playing out on St. Paul's East Side.
Carnegie attached some pragmatic strings to his lofty philanthropic goals. The Scottish-born titan of industry funded 3,000 libraries in 47 U.S. states and nine countries.
When he cut a $75,000 check to the city of St. Paul in 1914, the grant would finance construction of three brick libraries — joining more than 60 others across Minnesota. His offer required St. Paul to provide three suitable sites and kick in 10 percent of the grant's total, or $7,500 annually, to buy books and pay librarians.
The buildings were designed in 1916 on the drafting table of 27-year-old Charles Hausler, in just his second year as St. Paul's first city architect. As a teenager, Hausler had apprenticed under renowned architect Louis Sullivan in Chicago.
Fast-forward 100 years and two of those libraries — the St. Anthony Park and West Side Riverview branches — remain stalwarts of the city's library system.
But an amazing transformation has enveloped their recently abandoned triplet, once known as the Arlington Hills Library at 1105 Greenbrier St. The rectangular box building, with its arched windows, was vacated in 2014 when the library moved into new, $16 million digs at a community center four blocks north on Payne Avenue.
That's when a couple of professors who live nearby in the Dayton's Bluff neighborhood turned a longtime dream into a viable scheme. Rachleff was just retiring as a labor historian at Macalester College in St. Paul. His wife, Beth Cleary, teaches in the college's theater department.