George Malone was a hawk-eyed patrolman of the Holmes Electric Protective Company turned dynamite snuffer. One late June night in 1915, he spotted a flame beneath the gates of the Carnegie Mansion on 91st Street—Andrew himself had left for Bar Harbor to convalesce from influenza—and put out a makeshift explosive planted by, probably, an Italian anarchist of the Bresci Circle (the same group that had conspired to assassinate another tycoon, John Rockefeller, three months prior). Had Malone’s vigilance failed him, the bomb may have blown the doors clear off the strikebreaker’s dour manse.
This year’s design triennial at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, housed for the last fifty years in chez Carnegie, attempted its own sort of misfired explosion. (On the subject of open doors: Cooper Hewitt is the only Smithsonian museum that charges admission.) Spanning twenty-five displays across three floors, Making Home expends an inordinate amount of energy tarrying with the ghost of the Prince of Steel, as if the first step toward making the world a home for everyone were unseat…