An employee completes the chisel work on the slot in the harp’s column. What began as a sheet music shop at the corner of Washington and Clark grew into a manufacturer of everything from mandolins to violins to guitars and, beginning in 1889, harps. “It was a cow town back then,” says Steve Fritzmann, Lyon & Healy’s national sales manager. They stared out at a mud-caked Clark Street downtown, with its rickety wooden buildings, and saw - possibility. Healy came to Chicago in the soggy spring of 1864. MADE IN ILLINOIS: The products and people that make our state tickīostonians George W. An employee at the Lyon & Healy harp factory works on the “action,” a mechanical device made up of some 1,500 parts that allows the harpist to control the instrument’s pitch. In factories across Illinois, craftsmen are quietly building some of America’s most storied musical instruments, including violins and even pipe organs. People come from the farthest reaches of the planet - South America, Europe, Singapore, Tasmania - to buy them.Īnd Lyon & Healy isn’t alone. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has two gold-leafed Prince William Concert Grand harps - each valued at about $93,000. And not just any ol’ harps, but arguably, the world’s finest instruments.
Here, where freight trucks and elevated trains rumble by all day, it’s common for passersby to ask: “Do you really make harps in there?” Little about the utilitarian brick building on the city’s industrial Near West Side hints at what’s made inside.
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