The resilience of their instruments has been a key to the company’s longevity. The company’s first harp, a Model 21, #501, built in 1889, was still being used by a Chicago public high school orchestra until 1979. “Let us build a harp that will no longer worry its owner because of its liability to get out of order easily let us build a harp that will go around the world without loosening a screw.” So what accounts for Lyon & Healy’s staying power? Well, many factors, of course, but perhaps it has something to do with Healy’s original intent when he set out to build harps. Not many American companies have been around for 150 years. After 25 years in the instrument business, Lyon & Healy produced its first pedal harp in 1889. They survived two major fires, the second of which was the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The company quickly expanded their business to making and repairing musical instruments. Healy opened a small sheet-music shop in 1864 at the corner of Washington and Clark Streets, not far from Lyon & Healy’s current location. The company has been in its current building since 1928 and occupied an adjacent building for 38 years prior to that. Lyon & Healy has been making harps on this site in Chicago since 1890. As with any space where art is created, the sense that something special happens here is palpable, from the sun-drenched corner of the second floor where a worker planes the edge of a soundbox by hand, to the small room on the fourth floor where 23-karat gold is painstakingly applied to the column of a Prince William. The dichotomy of the rough physical exterior of Lyon & Healy’s Chicago factory and the beautiful instruments produced inside its four walls is not lost on anyone who visits.
It is here where world-class instruments have been produced for decades.
But there it is, a five-story brick building, standing eye-to-eye with the green line of the “El” (Chicago’s elevated rail system), as the train thunders by every few minutes. This gritty West Loop neighborhood seems an unlikely home to the artistic operations of Lyon & Healy. When you pull up to the corner of Lake and Ogden in the old meat-packing district of Chicago, looking for a renowned harp factory, you might think you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Lyon & Healy found a recipe for success early on, and 150 years later, they are still building harps from the ground up in Chicago. Planing the rosewood inlay on a Style 23 Gold harp.
0 kommentar(er)
