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| Image courtesy of the Smithsonian InstitutionĪs the city boomed after the Civil War, so too boomed the fortunes of Philadelphia’s piano makers. Evenden, whose firm Loud & Brothers by 1824 was producing an extraordinary 680 pianos a year, chose to locate nearby at 150 Chestnut Street.Ī six-foot-tall upright piano produced in Philadelphia by Albrecht in 1835.
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Artisans Christian Frederick Lewis Albrecht, a German immigrant, and Thomas Loud Evenden, an emigré from London, led the nascent industry in production of high-end instruments for wealthy clientele.
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While Boston, Chicago, and New York would later become the dominant centers of piano making in the United States, Philadelphia was the instrument’s first port of harbor out of Europe, boasting 80 piano makers within the city’s limits in the early 19th century. Despite a precipitous decline in ownership from one piano in every 316 homes in 1978 to less than 1 in 3,000 today, many of the instruments that do survive remain in use, having outlasted their original owners, their makers, the factories they were produced in, and the showrooms where they were sold, still retaining their power as symbols of technology and class mobility. Successive waves of increased efficiency and low-cost immigrant labor gradually reduced the price from a luxury status symbol that could cost as much as a small house to a mass-market commodity that symbolized ascent into the middle class in the post-war era. Originally produced on commission for wealthy families in the early 1800s, the piano as an object of material heritage came of age in the first era of mass industrialization.
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| Image courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphiaįew objects are as permanent in the fabric of American culture as the piano. An advertising card from 1885 for Blasius & Sons, once the largest piano dealer in Philadelphia.