HENRY Z. STEINWAY

Last of family to head piano maker

Henry Z. Steinway, the last Steinway to run the piano-making company his family started in 1853, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

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 who founded Steinway & Sons. Henry Steinway 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.)

After closing 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," Mr. Steinway said years later.

In the 1940s, after the death of a cousin who had been the company's general manager, Mr. 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.

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. 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.