He posted the video of the dumped pianos that drew such shocked responses. Churches and schools often do not have room or the means to maintain them.īrian Goodwin, who owns Piano Movers of Nashua, N.H., and who had 30 pianos in his warehouse ready for the dump recently, said he created the Web site Piano Adoption partly as a clearing house to find homes for unwanted pianos. But there is just so much room in his warehouse for adoptees. Any rescued piano, he noted, is also a potential future move for O’Mara Meehan. O’Mara, whose company tries to give away discarded pianos. The company was founded in 1874 by the great-grandfather of the brothers Bryan and Charles T.
O’Mara Meehan Piano Movers said it takes 5 to 10 pianos a month to the debris transfer site here. Whatever the reason, people in the piano world agree that disposals are mounting. Piano dealers also blame other changes in society for a lack of demand in the used-piano market: cuts in music education in schools, competition for practice time from other pursuits, a drop in spending on home furnishings with the fall of the housing market. That’s a lot of pianos now reaching the end of the line. The average life span rarely exceeds 80 years, piano technicians say. (In 2011, 41,000 were sold, along with 120,000 digital pianos and 1.1 million keyboards, according to Music Trades magazine.) Nearly 365,000 were sold at the peak, in 1910, according to the National Piano Manufacturers Association.
So from 1900 to 1930, the golden age of piano making, American factories churned out millions of them. “We bust them up with a sledgehammer,” said Jeffrey Harrington, the owner of Harrington Moving & Storage in Maplewood, N.J. Piano movers are making regular runs to the dump, becoming adept at dismantling instruments, selling parts to artists, even burning them for firewood. So instead of selling them to a neighbor, donating them to a church or just passing them along to a relative, owners are far more likely to discard them, technicians, movers and dealers say. The value of used pianos, especially uprights, has plummeted in recent years. This kind of scene has become increasingly common. The site, a trash-transfer station in this town 20 miles north of Philadelphia, is just one place where pianos go to die. After 10 pianos were dumped, a small yellow loader with a claw in front scuttled in like a vicious beetle, crushing keyboards, soundboards and cases into a pile. A Lester upright thudded onto its side with a final groan of strings, a death-rattling chord. The Knabe baby grand did a cartwheel and landed on its back, legs poking into the air.