Philanthropy
Cyrus Curtis is number 20 on a list of the richest Americans. He was known for his philanthropy to hospitals, museums, universities, and schools. He donated $2 million to the Franklin Institute, $1.25 million to the Drexel Institute of Technology for the construction of Curtis Hall, and $1 million to the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained a pipe organ manufactured by the Austin Organ Company, which had been displayed at the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926 and donated it to the University of Pennsylvania. It was built into Irvine Auditorium when the building was constructed, and is known to this day as the Curtis Organ. It is one of the largest pipe organs in the world. Curtis donated pipe organs to many institutions in Philadelphia and the biography retained in the library of his burial location notes that on the day of his funeral, all of those organs were played to honor him.
In memory of his boyhood music teacher, Curtis donated the Kotzschmar Memorial Organ to Portland City Hall Auditorium in 1912. In Thomaston, Maine, he funded the 1927-29 recreation of Montpelier, the demolished 1795 mansion of Revolutionary War general, Henry Knox.
Curtis was a major organizer for and backer of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He anonymously made up its deficits in its early years. Mary Louise Curtis Bok founded Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, and dedicated it to her father in 1924.
Read more about this topic: Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis
Famous quotes containing the word philanthropy:
“I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... the hey-day of a woman’s life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)