Company Towns: Steinway Village (Astoria, NYC)

“All of this may sound idyllic, until you realize that workers need never go home or stop working.”

-Hardy Green, The Company Town: The Industrial Eden's and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy

Upcoming Events:

June 29 —The Making

Labor Day, Sept 2 —The Making

This Fall—The Drop

This Compony Towns project looks at two transformational movements deep in the roots of Astoria’s history, that of William Steinway’s “company town” imaginings and the Steinway Piano factory worker’s fight for unionization and labor rights.

William Steinway was aggressively anti-union, frequently hiring police to violently contain strikers in his Manhattan factories. When these violent crackdowns were unsuccessful, Steinway chose to move one of these factories to Astoria to escape what he described as “the machinations of the anarchists and socialists” and to remove his employees from the influence of labor organizers. Promising a “better way of living”, Steinway built up Astoria, into an “utopian” factory town of two-story houses, parks, schools, churches and paved roads he called Steinway Village. Historian, Richard K. Lieberman, writes in his book, Steinway & Sons, that this transformation of the land offered him “power over his workers by enabling him to evict strikers from their houses, foreclose on their mortgages, or restrict their credit at local stores.” Many of these buildings still form the core structure of the Astoria neighborhood we see today. But instead of the intended effect, workers in the Astoria and Manhattan Steinway factories joined forces to initiate larger cross-river strikes including fights for pay increases and 8-hour work days. Today, Steinway factory craftspeople are proudly union strong.

These two tales of transformation, one superimposed on a place to control people and the other an example of the depths of collective people power, tell a partial story of the neighborhood where Astoria Park finds its home.

Participate in the ripples of history by beading an interactive parachute alongside your neighbors. This parachute speaks to the origins of the Steinway Village company town (Astoria). Return to activate the parachute you helped create on Labor Day!