Lyon & Healy, located at Ogden and Randolph, a few blocks from me.
We’ve written about Lyon & Healy previously, but the Chicago Collective1 has a slightly different slant:
In a recession that shuttered longtime manufacturers, reshaped whole industries and sent millions of people looking for work, one might expect a company that makes $100,000 harps to be wobbling at the knees, if not toppled over by now.
But Lyon & Healy, the Chicago company that produces one of the music world’s most esoteric instruments, knows something about weathering disasters, having survived the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 and the Great Depression.
Even as domestic sales fell by 25 percent since 2008, the company, which opened in 1864 and made its first harp in 1889, kept all 135 employees on the payroll and continued to build its instruments using carefully selected hardwoods and master carvers.
“I think people are still looking for things that are sound investments,” said Stephen Fritzmann, a master harpmaker and Lyon & Healy’s national sales manager.
(click to continue reading With Sound Investments, Harp Company Endures – NYTimes.com.)
though every article written about the harp seemingly has to mention Joanna Newsom:
Footnotes:Lyon & Healy’s harps “just speak beautifully,” Joanna Newsom, an innovative American harpist, wrote in an e-mail. “They have such dynamic breadth and coloration. And I think they each have a sort of ‘spirit.’ ”
…
The company may owe part of its economic durability to the fact that harps are having a bit of a moment. They have appeared on the hit television show “Glee” and have gotten a boost from Ms. Newsom, a Lyon & Healy devotee whose style has taken the instrument out of its classical mold and brought its sound to a general audience.
…
The aroma of drying wood and the din of harp music fill the company’s five-floor, 64,000-square-foot factory in the West Loop. The instruments pass through several stages of production — building the mechanism and body, carving the column and base, and gilding and stringing the instrument. “I still love just walking through those doors and being surrounded by all those harps,” Ms. Bullen said.
Ms. Newsom plays a rented style No. 23, which stands just over 6 feet, weighs 81 pounds and is intricately carved along the base and crown with flowers. She said she was awe-struck during her first visit to the factory, which she described as the equivalent of “stumbling on El Dorado.”
- New York Times division [↩]