PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

Daniel and Carole Kamin have had a busy two years. Since January 2024, they have made headline-worthy donations to six organizations in Pittsburgh. The total? More than $165 million.

“Three years ago, we wouldn’t even be thinking about any of this,” Carole says. That changed when the chief financial officer at Daniel’s company suggested they start a foundation. That way, the CFO said, “you can decide where you want money to go.”

The couple created the Kamin Family Foundation in 2023 and, in doing so, they joined Pittsburgh’s robust philanthropic legacy, built by the likes of Andrew Carnegie, Mary Schenley and Madam C. J. Walker, among many others.

A love of learning, compassion for others and a fascination with the world both past and present have infused the couple’s decisions about how they spend their time and money.

DANIEL G. AND CAROLE L. KAMIN | PHOTO COURTESY OF CAROLE L. KAMIN

How It Started

Daniel Kamin’s story begins with his grandfather, Herman Kamin, who lived something of a Pittsburgh fairy tale. He emigrated from Lithuania in 1901. In 1916, he founded Kamin Realty Co. initially working in home development. He pioneered the development of Squirrel Hill into a central, vibrant Jewish community. (The neighborhood’s Kamin Street — between Beacon and Hobart streets — is named after him.)

Eventually, Herman shifted his focus to real-estate investment. Daniel began managing the company in 1969 with his brother, Robert, before establishing and focusing exclusively on his own commercial real estate company; it continues to expand under his leadership. The company’s 2024 portfolio boasted an inventory of 400 properties that they lease to other businesses across 44 states and Puerto Rico.

Both Daniel and Carole exhibited an early acumen for business. As a kid, Daniel leased parking spaces during games for $1 on his family home’s lawn near the former Forbes Field in Oakland. At 11, Carole started a cattle business on her parents’ 1,200-acre hobby ranch in Michigan. She first learned about purchasing by buying newborn dairy calves and formula to feed them.

Carole studied business at Michigan State University. In 1975, the Carnegie Museum of Art recruited her to Pittsburgh as the first buyer for its new gift shop.

While she enjoyed working in the art museum, and later the Museum of Natural History, what really caught her eye were the dinosaur skeletons. She hadn’t been exposed to dinosaurs in her childhood the way Daniel had (in addition to museum trips, he also went fossil hunting in Wyoming). “I came here and just fell in love,” she says.

She fell in love elsewhere, too. After a year of going on bad dates in Pittsburgh, Carole’s friend set her up with Daniel on a blind date at the Tender Trap, now the Casbah location in Shadyside. It was serendipity: It turned out they lived around the corner from one another. They married in 1978 and had three sons.

Over the years, the Kamins began making sizable donations to Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens (Daniel and his brother had the East Room dedicated to their mother in 2006), Phipps Aquatic Gardens, Family House, the Heinz Hall waterfall and the UPMC Mercy Vision Institute, among other entities.

Additionally, Daniel and his brother, Robert, in 2006 created a memorial fund in their deceased parents’ names. Housed within The Pittsburgh Foundation, the Harry Wallace Kamin and Dorothy McNally Kamin Fund proved so personally rewarding that Daniel and Carole created their own legacy fund in 2011, to be advised by their sons.

On a smaller scale, Carole estimates that Daniel, who is now in his early 80s, gives annually to about 200 organizations, locally and otherwise. Carole also volunteers on an assortment of boards for organizations throughout the city.

DANIEL G. AND CAROLE L. KAMIN WITH ANDY MASICH, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE HEINZ HISTORY CENTER. | PHOTO COURTESY OF HEINZ HISTORY CENTER

A Passion for Dinos and the Cosmos

Carole’s enthusiasm for dinosaurs lasted long after she retired in the 1990s. In 2006, she and Daniel donated enough money to name part of the Natural History Museum’s upper floor the Daniel G. & Carole L. Kamin T. rex Overlook. They gave $5 million in 2016 to permanently endow the museum’s director position. And, in February of this year, they donated $25 million to refresh and make more accessible the Hall of Dinosaurs and to continue paleontological research; it’s the largest singular monetary gift since Andrew Carnegie’s in 1895.

That will have two major impacts, says Gretchen Baker, Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin director of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The first is renovating and refreshing its signature dinosaur exhibit.

“Truly, the reason most of our visitors come to the museum, and our international reputation, is largely gained through this incredible collection of dinosaurs that we have and how they’re displayed,” Baker says. “So it’s important that we make sure that that signature exhibition is the best-in-class for the future. It’s been almost 20 years since it opened. So this gift is going to help us bring it up to this decade, integrating new media, some new specimens, new interpretation.”

Secondly, most of the gift is designated for the long term — it will go into the museum’s unrestricted operating endowment. “And that will make sure that we can continue to care for these collections,” Baker says.

“I’m the one who had the dinosaur dreams,” Carole says about her passion. Literally dreams of “pterodactyls flying down Slippery Rock Creek and baby dinosaurs [running around] in the basement of the Museum of Natural History.”

While Carole was infatuated with dinosaurs, Daniel looked to the stars. His love of astronomy and childhood visits to the former Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science on the North Side inspired him to build his own telescope when he was 13. This, and his belief in the vision of Science Center director Jason Brown, eventually led to the Kamins’ decision to donate $65 million to the Carnegie Science Center in 2024.

The telescope became a central image in stories about the donation as well as a literal image in the Kamin Science Center logo, which was revealed as part of the museum’s grand reopening under its new name in September. (Carole says an anxiety-riddled search for the telescope finally ended in the storage space where she keeps Carnegie Christmas tree decorations.)

“Dan and Carole Kamin [have] committed to ensuring that future generations of Pittsburghers would have the opportunity to feel the same inspiration that Dan felt as a kid,” Brown said during his remarks at the reopening.

The money will, among other things, help the science center to launch nine new exhibitions in the next two and a half years. The first — Sports 360 — opens in December. Next summer’s Science of Speed, to be housed in the former SportsWorks building, will include a 750-foot, multi-story electric go kart racetrack.

The donation, Brown added, inspired others to give as well. “This gift from the Kamin family created not only incredible momentum, but it validated something about our belief, and that belief was that we should dream big.”

Opening Museum Doors

Another love of Daniel’s is history, which he studied at the University of Pennsylvania. Toward this end, the Kamins donated $11.5 million to the Heinz History Center this past summer. The money provides free admission for children 17 and under in perpetuity — an idea that had been on the museum president’s wish list for years — as well as support the building’s expansion. That benefit for kids started Sept. 1.

Carole says it is Daniel’s belief that “if there was only one kid going to the history center that is inspired to do something great, it’s worth it.”

In the future, Carole would love for children to have free admission to all museums. She also hopes those institutions continue to have the money for programming. “That’s so important,” she says.

“We need to be able to be exposed to different things, new things, things that are happening around the world.”

Amy Whipple is a part-time writer, part-time writing instructor and full-time awesome. In addition to Pittsburgh Magazine, her work can be found in PublicSource and The Imprint.