Astoria, the popular northwest Queens enclave, is still home to one of the world’s most famous brands despite its rapidly changing demographics and buzzy avenues.

Tucked away at the top of the neighborhood at 19th Avenue and Steinway Place, the Steinway & Sons piano factory still builds its iconic pianos from start to finish on the same property it’s owned since the 1870s.

If you’re like me and you have lived in Astoria without knowing Steinway & Sons is still in the neighborhood, now you know it’s not just Steinway Street’s namesake from long ago. It’s actually still operating and turning out their gorgeous pianos.

Below are five “secrets” we learned about the factory during a recent visit.

1. Steinway Street in Astoria is named after the company

Steinway & Sons, which was founded in 1853 by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway in a Manhattan loft on Varick Street, has owned and operated the same land in Queens since the 1880s. In fact, it owned 400 acres of land in the area and built a sawmill, a foundry and a streetcar line, eventually creating “Steinway Village” for its workers with a school. Eventually, it all got incorporated into Long Island City, but Steinway Street remains.

It has seen a lot of history, including World War II, when it manufactured glider parts for the government and G.I. pianos for the troops.

2. It only makes 1,300 pianos a year

Because making a single piano is such a long and painstaking process (they’re each made by humans), the factory creates only six a day, and 1,300 a year. From start to finish, a single piano takes 11 months to craft. A single grand piano has about 12,000 parts.

Between its New York and Germany factories, Steinway & Sons makes 2,500 grand pianos and a couple of hundred uprights, according to Anthony Gilroy, the company’s vice president of marketing and communications, who took us on the tour.

“When you see how big these places are—there are about 225 union workers to build six pianos a day—then you realize how much is going into each of them,” he tells us on our tour. “Walking through the factory, you see hundreds of pianos in different stages of manufacture, but it’s an 11-month process.”

A single piano will move through various departments in the factory. Workers first select the wood crafting the rim, including rock maple from the Eastern U.S. and Canda, sugar pine and Alaskan Sitka spruce. The rim is bent into the iconic piano shape, which was patented by C. F. Theodore Steinway in 1880. Then, the case is dried again for several months and is trimmed to get rid of excess corners. It then goes to the “Belly Department,” where “belly men” remove excess areas of the piano’s bridge called “notching the bridge” and manually nail hundreds of pins in it to guide the forthcoming strings. A Steinway piano carries up to 40,000 pounds of tension from its strings.

Nearing the end of the patented process, the piano is sent to Keys & Action, where technicians use weights to check the weight and balance of each key. They ensure “fullness and brilliance of sound” by fine-tuning the instrument with an extensive tone regulation process. The keys are integrated with the piano and tested in the “Pounding Room,” where each key is played up to 3,200 times and adjusted until it reaches “perfection.” Finally, it is finished after it is sanded, painted and hardened.

3. 75% of its workers are immigrants

Steinway & Sons has unionized employees, many of whom have been working there for as long as 50 years and the majority of them come from other countries. It’s always been that way, Gilroy says. “Today, the workers are mostly from Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe … our workforce is all coming together to do something special, they’re building something that’s best in class and known as a luxury product.”

4. Celebrities visit the factory

Beloved musicians like Billy Joel and Regina Spektor among others have visited the factory because they exclusively use Steinway & Sons pianos (their signed posters decorate a hallway). Cole Porter, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Duke Ellington, Igor Stravinsky, Nina Simone and Arthur Rubinstein were some of the company’s most illustrious customers while they were alive.

5. It recently sold land to Robert De Niro’s forthcoming studio

Remember how the company owned 400 acres of land in Astoria? It sold off more of it (a storage area for finished pianos) in 2019 to Wildflower Studios, a massive film studio backed by actor Robert De Niro.

When it opens this year, the studio will be made up of “a mix of interconnected spaces” that includes office spaces, 11 sound stages, a fitness center, a slew of lounges, cafes and production-support areas.

The Bjarke Ingels Group designed what is apparently to be the first “vertical commercial film, television and film studio” in the world.

Read the original article at timeout.com

Introducing the Steinway Duet, a unique instrument from the Special Grand Collection…

The instrument incorporates the minimalist elegance of Figured Sycamore with Steinway’s classic high gloss white finish in this breathtaking combination of art and function. This rare wood is nearly white in color with a fine, notably uniform structure and figured grain pattern. The light-colored wood evokes a minimalist elegance.

Only one of these pianos is available in America this year. To see, hear and experience the instrument for yourself, contact us today for more information or an appointment!

Visit here for more information or to see how this piano could be exclusively yours!

Since 1853, Steinway & Sons has built the pianos by which all others are judged. Every Steinway grand and upright piano is a masterpiece of handcrafted precision and a consummate work of art—painstakingly built by experienced artisans with unending passion for their craft. And today’s Steinways are the best Steinways yet, supported by generations of expertise and state-of-the-art technological advances.

Celebrate the 170th Anniversary of Steinway & Sons—an iconic brand and an indelible piece of American musical history—with special financing for three full years.

We’re celebrating with a special financing offer for a brief time only! Find out more here…

Your Steinway & Sons piano can be the perfect expression of you. Steinway’s Special Grand Piano Collection is a perfect opportunity to match your very special style with a very special piano.

There is no better example in this collection than the Duet. It combines the minimalist elegance of Figured Sycamore with Steinway’s classic high gloss white in this breathtaking combination of art and function.

This rare wood is nearly white in color with a fine, notable uniform structure and straight grain that may be figured; this light-color wood evokes a minimalist elegance.

Only one of these pianos will be available in America this year. To see, hear and play this piano for yourself, contact the store today, or visit here for our complete selection of available Steinway pianos.

NEW YORK — One skyscraper stands out from the rest in the Manhattan skyline. It’s not the tallest, but it is the skinniest — the world’s skinniest, in fact.

The 84-story residential Steinway Tower, designed by New York architecture firm SHoP Architects, has the title of “most slender skyscraper in the world” thanks to its logic-defying ratio of width to height: 1-to-23 1/2.

“Any time it’s 1-to-10 or more that’s considered a slender building; 1-to-15 or more is considered exotic and really difficult to do,” SHoP Architects founding principal Gregg Pasquarelli said. “The most slender buildings in the world are mostly in Hong Kong, and they’re around 17- or 18-to-1.”

The 60 apartments in the tower range in cost from $18 million to $66 million per unit, and offer 360-degree views of the city. It’s located just south of Central Park, along a stretch of Manhattan’s 57th Street known as “Billionaires’ Row.”

At 1,428 feet (435 meters), the building is the second-tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere, second to the nearby Central Park Tower at 1,550 feet (470 meters). For comparison, the world’s tallest tower is Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which stands at 2,717 feet (828 meters).

Steinway Tower is so skinny at the top that whenever the wind ramps up, the luxury homes on the upper floors sway around by a few feet.

“Every skyscraper has to move,” Pasquarelli said. “If it’s too stiff, it’s actually more dangerous — it has to have flexibility in it.”

To prevent the tower from swaying too far, the architects created a counterbalance with tuned steel plates. And while the exterior has the de rigueur reflective glass, it also includes a textured terracotta and bronze facade that creates wind turbulence to slow the acceleration of the building, Pasquarelli said. About 200 rock anchors descend at most 100 feet (30 meters) into the underlying bedrock to provide a deep foundation.

Steinway Tower has a long history as the former location of Steinway Hall, constructed in 1924. JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group bought the building in 2013, and now they’re looking to the future.

“What I’m hoping is that 50 years from now, you’ve only known New York with 111 West 57th St.,” Pasquarelli said. “I hope it holds a special place in all future New Yorkers’ hearts.”

Find out more about Steinway here, or…

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