This morning marks 140 years since the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor. On October 28, 1886, the great copper figure on Bedloe’s Island, the place we now call Liberty Island, was formally given to the American people. She has held her torch above the water ever since.
Anniversaries like this one invite us to stop and listen. In our shop in Lafayette, Colorado, we listen for a living. We tune, regulate, and restore pianos, and we have learned that old instruments carry their years in a particular way. This fall, one of those instruments has a great deal to say about 1886.
A Gift and a Promise
On the morning of the dedication, a parade set out from Madison Square and wound down Fifth Avenue and Broadway toward the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. It became the city’s first ticker-tape parade.
President Grover Cleveland accepted the statue on behalf of the nation. His draft remarks, preserved at the Library of Congress, open with a sentence of plain dignity: “The people of the United States accept with gratitude from their brethren of the French Republic the grand and completed work of art we here inaugurate.” The following year, D. Appleton & Company published a souvenir volume, Inauguration of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, so that the day could be remembered in print.
That phrase, Liberty Enlightening the World, was the statue’s formal name. Liberty, in that vision, was a light to be shared.
A Nation Learning to Sing
In the 1880s, before recordings and radio became part of daily life, Americans made their own music. Hymns were sung in churches and at gravesides. Brass bands played marches in town squares. In the evening, families gathered around the parlor to sing popular songs and sentimental ballads.
At the center of that parlor stood the piano. For a growing number of American households, owning one was a statement of hope. It said that a family had a settled home, that its children would learn something beautiful, and that neighbors and newcomers could be welcomed with a song.
New York City was the heart of American piano making in those years. Builders and showrooms clustered in lower Manhattan near Union Square. Steinway Hall stood on East 14th Street. A short walk away, at 34 and 36 University Place, stood the headquarters and warerooms of Hazelton Brothers.
Hazelton Brothers and the Parade That Passed By
Hazelton Brothers was established in 1850 and became one of the respected high-grade piano houses of New York. The firm kept its headquarters on University Place from 1869 until 1919; the address was later renumbered as 64 through 68. Writing in 1890, the historian Daniel Spillane noted that Hazelton scale designs were copied by other makers. Alfred Dolge, writing in 1911, associated the Hazelton name with New York’s “Knickerbocker aristocracy,” the old families of the city.
The firm’s standing rested on more than pedigree. At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the judges examined Hazelton’s grand, square and upright pianos and unanimously recommended the firm for the highest award. Judge H. K. Oliver’s citation gave the reasons: “elastic touch, singing quality, delicacy and power of tone, with highest excellence of workmanship.” Those words became the Hazelton slogan, and the firm was still printing the full citation at the front of its illustrated catalog in the mid-1880s. In May 1884, two years before our piano was built, the composer George F. Root wrote from Chicago: “Were I selecting a piano for myself, I should select a Hazelton.”
The University Place building was a working place, not just a showroom. A New York newspaper description that the firm reprinted in an early-1880s brochure tells of six stories under a mansard roof, with offices and warerooms on the ground floor, where the acoustics were said to be so fine that the softest note could be heard at the far end of the room. The floors above were given over to “the putting together and finishing” of the pianos. The same profile divided the work between the brothers: Frederick Hazelton had charge of the musical department and let no piano leave that did not satisfy his ear, while Henry superintended the mechanical side.
On the morning of the dedication, the parade route passed about a block from the Hazelton headquarters. We do not know who stood at those windows that day, but it is a pleasing thing to picture: the people who sold fine pianos, a short walk from the cheering crowds, as the nation received its great symbol of welcome.
There is a quieter kind of patriotism in that picture, too. While the statue was being raised in the harbor, American craftspeople were doing their own patient work in iron, wood, paint, and felt. They built instruments meant to last for generations and to fill ordinary homes with music. That work is part of how a free people builds a common life.
Hazelton’s own catalog from those years shows what that patience looked like. The firm kept three to five years’ stock of lumber, chose it in the log, and let it air-dry in the yard for years before it went to the steam-heated dry rooms. Each case spent about four months in the varnish department. Hammers were wool felt over mahogany, capped by hand with buckskin, and the tone regulators studied the acoustic science of Helmholtz and Tyndall. Every piano left the building warranted for five years.
“Liberty” Comes to Lafayette
That brings us to the piano now in our shop: an 1886 Hazelton Bros. grand, serial number 14279. In the shop we have come to call it “Liberty,” or our “Special Edition.” Those are our nicknames, not factory model names.
The case is finished in high-gloss ebony. The fallboard reads simply: Hazelton Bros. / Established 1850 / New York. Lift the lid, though, and you find a surprise. The cast-iron plate (the harp) has been hand painted. Flowers and vines run across it. Scrollwork decorates the areas around the portholes, and geometric borders trace the struts.
In forty years of working on pianos, I have never seen another harp painted like this one, from any maker. Then there are the string felts: red and blue, side by side. I have never seen two felt colors used together on another maker’s piano. Given the year it was built, I believe this flourish was likely a patriotic one, and that this piano may have been part of a small commemorative group made around the time of the October 1886 dedication.
Hazelton’s illustrated catalog of about 1884 lists three grands, all in rosewood cases: a six-foot parlor grand at $1,050, a larger parlor grand at $1,250, and a concert grand at $1,400. Nowhere in its pages does it describe an ebony case or a decorated plate, which makes the painting on this harp all the more striking to us.
We want to be careful here. This piano was not part of the ceremonies on Bedloe’s Island. It was built at the firm’s University Place works — headquarters, warerooms, and finishing floors a block from the parade route — in the same year Liberty was dedicated, and someone took unusual care to make it beautiful.
Restoration is under way. So far, the piano has received new Renner shanks and hammers. New strings and a full refinish are planned, so that “Liberty” can sing again.
The Words on the Pedestal
Many Americans associate the statue with Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus.” She wrote it in 1883 to help raise money for the statue’s pedestal. Its most famous lines speak directly to the world: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The poem was placed on a bronze plaque in 1903, years after the dedication and years after our piano was made.
Lazarus understood that liberty is, among other things, an invitation. Music works the same way. A song sung in a parlor, a hymn shared by strangers, a piano played for whoever walks into the room: each of these says, you belong here, come in. Music and liberty are both meant to be shared, and both grow richer the more voices join in.
There is a symmetry to the dates that we enjoy: 1776, the date inscribed on the tablet in Liberty’s hand; 1886, the year of her dedication and the year this piano was built; and 2026, her 140th anniversary, and the day we introduce “Liberty” on our website.
An Invitation of Our Own
If you are in the Boulder County area and would like to see this remarkable instrument, we would be glad to show it to you by appointment in our Lafayette shop. When fully restored, “Liberty” will be offered at $45,000. You can read more and view photographs on the 1886 Hazelton Bros. “Liberty” Grand #14279 page.
Whether you come by appointment to buy, to play, or simply to look at that painted harp, you are welcome. On a day devoted to a lady who lifts her lamp beside the golden door, that seems like the right spirit in which to open ours.
— Trevor Nelson, Registered Piano Technician, Renaissance Piano Service
