Henry Z. Steinway, the last Steinway to run the pianomaking company his
family started in 1853, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
His death was confirmed by a daughter, Susan Steinway.
Steinway once said that he had taken countless piano lessons but never knew
”which is Beethoven’s this or Beethoven’s that.” He remained proficient on a
typewriter’s keys, however; long after the world had adopted personal
computers, he was still pounding away on his Smith-Corona manual.
Henry Ziegler Steinway — named for an uncle, and not to be confused with a
cousin, Henry Steinway Ziegler — was the great-grandson of Heinrich Engelhard
Steinway, the illiterate German immigrant before the ampersand in Steinway &
Sons. Henry was born Aug. 23, 1915, in his parents’ apartment on Park Avenue,
between East 52nd and 53rd Streets.
The location was important to his tradition-minded father, Theodore E.
Steinway. The Steinways’ factory, the largest piano plant in New York City
when it opened, had occupied that site from just before the Civil War until
about 1910. Theodore rented an apartment in the building that took the
factory’s place. (The apartment house was demolished in the 1950s to make way
for Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building.) By the time Henry was a boy, the
name Steinway had become almost synonymous with pianos, famous on concert
stages as well as in Tin Pan Alley. Irving Berlin paid homage in ”I Love a
Piano” with the lyric ”I know a fine way to treat a Steinway.”
After shuttering its Manhattan factory, Steinway & Sons moved its
manufacturing operations to Queens, and as a child, Henry wandered through a
labyrinth of sawdust-strewn workrooms. He joined the company after graduating
from Harvard in 1937 and began his career by building pianos, just as his
father and uncles had.
”I learned a respect for work that is actually done,” Steinway said years
later.
He also discovered that making instruments that have thousands of tiny
parts under the lid is not easy. He said it took him a day and a half to do
what the workers at the factory did in four hours.
In the 1940s, following the death of a cousin who had been the company’s
general manager, Steinway began overseeing operations at the company’s three
factories in Queens. Poor eyesight kept him away from the front lines during
World War II; the Army stationed him on Governors Island in New York Harbor.
He became the factory manager after the war and president of the company in
1955, when his father made a surprise announcement that he was stepping down,
immediately.
By then the piano business was struggling against changing technologies and
tastes. Phonographs and radios had displaced pianos as home entertainment
choices, and television was on the rise. As Steinway recalled in 2003:
”People would say: ‘You’re in the piano business? That doesn’t exist
anymore.”’
So he downsized the company — though he preferred the term ”right-sized”
— closing two of the plants in Queens. He decided that concert artists to
whom the company had lent pianos would have to return them, unless they bought
them.
He also arranged to sell Steinway Hall, the company’s building on West 57th
Street, to Manhattan Life Insurance Co. He moved most of the company’s
offices, including his own, to Queens. But the showroom, with its big front
window and arched ceilings, remained.
In 1972, he sold the company itself. ”It was the hippie time,” he
recalled in 2003. ”Nobody in the next generation …” He left the rest of
the sentence unsaid. He said he did not believe that any of his younger
relatives could take over, so he proposed a $20.1 million stock swap with CBS
Corp. The deliberations split the family, with his mother, Ruth, calling the
sale ”a betrayal,” although she ultimately voted for it.
— New York Times
