“Company towns” were only for Ohio steelworkers or West Virginia miners, weren’t they? Not at all—once upon a time, there was a bustling one in Astoria, Queens.
PIANO MEN
In the northwest corner of Astoria, Queens, not far from LaGuardia Airport, there’s a Steinway Place, Steinway Street, Steinway Reformed Church, Steinway Library, Steinway Playground…and nearly a century and a half ago, there was a whole Steinway Village. All were named for the Steinway family, the people who made the most famous pianos in the world.
Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg came to America from Germany around 1850 with three of his five sons (a fourth son followed later). When he arrived, he was already an accomplished piano builder and had trained his sons to build the instruments too. Once in New York, they Anglicized their name to Steinway (and Heinrich to Henry) and worked for established piano companies until they were able to start their own in 1853. With their superb craftsmanship and revolutionary techniques (such as a unique method of bending a single piece of maple to create a piano’s rim), the Stein-ways’ pianos quickly earned them national and international recognition.
GRAND SCHEME
The original Steinway workshop was on Varick Street in busy lower Manhattan. The company became so successful there that it had to move to a larger space at 81 Walker Street and then, in 1859, to an even larger factory at 53rd Street and Park Avenue. By the late 1860s, though, Henry’s son William had become convinced that the future of the company lay outside of Manhattan—away from the influence of labor unions and “the machinations of the anarchists and socialists…who were continually breeding among our workmen, and inciting them to strike.” In the early 1870s, William bought 400 acres of rural land across the East River in Queens and began to build—not pianos (yet), but a new piano factory and a town to go with it.
Washington Irving’s 1809 satirical history of Dutch New York contains the first known reference to St. Nicholas as “Santa Claus.”
William’s land was sparsely populated and mostly undeveloped, a perfect blank slate for his vision of the piano factory—a sawmill and a foundry to supply materials, housing for his workers to live in, stores, restaurants, and everything else needed for a Steinway Village. His plans included new streets with shade trees, good transportation, amusements, schools—and he watched over the progress of every phase of construction.
Steinway located the piano factory at #1 Steinway Place in the new town, near an inlet that was dubbed Steinway Creek. The wide, tree-lined main avenue of the new neighborhood was named Steinway Street; it became the main thoroughfare of the area. The two-story, red-brick Victorian row houses that would be rented to William’s workers were completed between 1877 and 1879 on streets that today are called 20th Avenue, 41st Street, and 42nd Street, but were at that time named for Steinway family members: Winthrop, Albert, and Theodore Streets.
William also donated land for a public school: P.S. 84 (still called Steinway Elementary School), where German was taught as a second language. Steinway Village had its own post office, parks, and one of the first free kindergartens in America. The Steinway Library was stocked with William’s private collection of books (it’s now part of the Queens Library system). In 1886, to provide his (mostly German) workers with recreation, William and a brewer named George Ehret constructed the Bowery Bay Beach amusement park and beer garden—it was renamed North Beach in 1890 and lasted until Prohibition began in 1920, but today is the site of LaGuardia Airport. By 1879, Steinway Village even had its own Protestant Union Church, and when the congregation outgrew the building, a new one was built in 1891. William Steinway donated the pipe organ. The church (still in existence) has since changed its name to Steinway Reformed Church.
A MAN, A PLAN, AND A TUNNEL
William Steinway wanted to be close to the village he’d created, so in 1873, he moved his family into a four-story, 27-room granite mansion a few blocks from the piano factory. The grand house had been built in the 1850s as a country villa, a showplace on a knoll overlooking the East River. It was renamed Steinway House, and the family occupied it until 1926. The building still stands at the end of 41st Street, between LaGuardia Airport and the Con-Edison Power Plant.
William Steinway was also passionately interested in public transportation, so he ran a horse-drawn rail line from his piano factory to the ferry that crossed the East River to Manhattan. William’s interest in transit lines earned him a place on New York’s transit commission, which soon became known as the Steinway Commission. In 1891, the commission released a plan for a new subway system, and looked for private financiers to build it. There were no serious bids, so William began constructing the Steinway Tunnel in 1892, an underwater trolley tunnel that ran between what is now Long Island City in Queens and Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. Construction began in 1892, but was stopped in 1893 due to flooding and financial problems. Both of these projects—the subway system and the tunnel—came to fruition after William’s death in 1896: In 1902, August Belmont, a rich financier, revived the Steinway Tunnel and also formed the Interborough Rapid Transit Company to build the subway that William Steinway had championed. The tunnel now carries the #7 IRT Flushing Line subway trains that connect Manhattan to Queens.
COMPANY TOWN NO MORE
Steinway pianos are still produced at the factory in Queens, but a series of other companies have bought out the Steinway line over the years. The area of Queens once called Steinway Village is still called Steinway, however, and many of the Steinway namesakes remain. And as of 2011, the 29 workers’ row houses were still there, though some have seen additions over the years, such as metal awnings, iron gates, and brick stoops.
As for the Queens factory itself, it’s still on the cutting edge of technology: In 2009, construction was completed on its new solar-powered rooftop dehumidifier and air-conditioning system, the largest in the world. The eco-friendly machinery became a model for similar systems around the Northeast.
In 1664 the tallest building in what is now New York was a two-story windmill.