Lyon & Healy factory tour, 1895

[John Goodin]

Thanks to the fascinating Google Book Search I came across this article from an 1895 issue of Music, a Monthly Magazine. It describes a visit to the Lyon & Healy factory in Chicago and has a few paragraphs that talk about mandolin building practices before moving on to guitars, banjos and harps.

Here's the link:
http://books.google.com/books?v....s_brr=1 (http://books.google.com/books?vid=LCCN08018040&id=RpA3NajAh1QC&pg=PA355&dq=mandolin&as_brr=1)

John G.

[fiddlinfool]

it might just be me - but I can't figure out how to drive that link...

[Paul Kotapish]

it might just be me - but I can't figure out how to drive that link...
In my browser, anyway, I could just left-click on the page and the next one popped up. The two little arrows flanking the page number at the top and bottom also provided nagivation to the adjacent pages, and the page-number box allows for jumping to a specific page.

It's an interesting read, John.

Thanks for posting the link.

I love the admiring bits about the newfangled equipment such as spindle saws for cutting fret slots and whatnot. I suppose that might explain the erratic intonation on some of those old factory-made mandolins. They must be the ones that were fretted once that gizmo had been running for a while and the little circular saws had all shifted from their original positions on the spindle . . . just enough to make getting the thing in tune impossible.

[infiniteposse]

Thanks so much for posting this. I love this kind of stuff. I just reposted the link on the Martin forum as well with props to you for the finding:)

[John Goodin]

I'm really enjoying the Google Book Search (no, I don't have any connection with Google outside of being a librarian who trys to keep up with what they're doing) and I've found lots of really interesting books using both the regular and the "full view" search options. I especially enjoy the illustrations in this article, it helps me imagine what the place was like back then. It would be interesting if one our Chicago area board members could snap and share a digital photo of whatever is at the corner of Ogden Ave. and Washington Blvd. today. Is this still Lyon & Healy property?

John G.

[Graham McDonald]

Perhaps it is just that it is a slow Friday afternoon,and the brain is not working a full capacity, but all I get is a 'snippet', and I can't work out how to see the whole thing....

thanks

graham

[John Goodin]

Graham & fiddlinfool, I'm not tech-savvy enough to know why the link behaves differently for you than it does for me. I've tried it on three different computers on two different networks and it works everytime for me. All three machines are running windows with Firefox as the default browser. Sorry for any frustration you're experiencing.

John G.

[Graham McDonald]

Still no success, both at work on a Windows box and at home on a Mac laptop. If this is a part of Googles 'scan the world's book and put them online' idea, is a pdf of this article available. Could one of those people who can download it, just forward it on if that is allowable.

Thanking someone in advance

graham

[Jim Garber]

Graham:
That pdf is over 300 pages and is over 15MB. I have downloaded it and would be glad to send it to you, if you can handle a file that big. PM me.

I have it on my home computer and could do it tonight or tomorrow.

Jim

[Graham McDonald]

Hello Jim,

If it doesn't strain your connection to much, that would be great. My email is graham@mcdonaldstrings.com

thanks

graham

[Paul Hostetter]

It would be interesting if one our Chicago area board members could snap and share a digital photo of whatever is at the corner of Ogden Ave. and Washington Blvd. today. Is this still Lyon & Healy property?

I am thousands of miles away from there and my telephoto lens is simply lacking, but Lyon and Healy is doing exactly what it started out doing 116 years ago or so: they make harps.

http://www.lyonhealy.com/products/pedalb/Style-3.jpg

And they are still at that same location. (http://www.lyonhealy.com/info/dir.html) . . .http://paramountshome.org/photoalbum/albums/userpics/10001/normal_LyonandHealy.jpg

[Paul Hostetter]

http://paramountshome.org/photoalbum/albums/userpics/10001/normal_1997lyonandhealy.jpg

[brunello97]

Hmm. Paul, these look like different (or else significantly remodeled) buildings. Any confirmation that a fire destroyed the initial building/factory, or was it a victim of 'progress' as so many Chicago landmarks were?

Mick

[Martin Jonas]

I suspect that Google is filtering IP numbers by country: I get the same as fiddlinfool (in Canada) and Graham (in Australia) -- a useless two-line snippet of the contents of this book with no link or option for getting anything more. It seems to me that Google may only make this file available for users in the US. Anybody outside the US who manages to get this link to work?

Martin

[Jim Garber]

Graham:
I trie to send the file to you but it blunced back since it is prob too big for the current setting of your email.

I uploaded the whole file to this address (http://www.classicalmandolin.net/LHbook/1895_LH.pdf).

Anyone who needs to, feel free to download it. The chapter we are interestde starts on page 362. I tried to extract the pages in Acrobat to make a smaller file, but it did not quite work.

Jim

[Paul Hostetter]

Mick - the second photo and the catalog image are both the same building, look again. The facade was changed, but the windows are the same. There was an earlier L&H building, at least according to an old catalog cover I saw once, with horses in front. But I think the fabled fire (I'm not sure there really was a fire, it might be like the CF Martin fire that never happened) took place in this building.

In any case, cribbing from Bob Devellis's page, during the 1920s, Lyon & Healy evolved from an instrument builder to a musical wholesaler. Perhaps they were just prescient. In 1928, Tonk Bros. bought the wholesale division. That same year, the J. R. Stewart Co. acquired the machinery and patent rights for the Lyon & Healy fretted instruments. (They did their best to produce instruments built to the same quality standards as Lyon & Healy but were bankrupt by 1930, about five months after the stock market crashed.) Also in 1928, the Holton Co. took over Lyon & Healy’s band instrument production. So, by the end of that year, only harps continued to be made by Lyon & Healy – as they are to this day.

According to George Manno, Joseph Zorzi was the person in charge of Lyon & Healy's mandolin production in the early 1920's. He and Philip Gabriel made the bodies while their colleague, Fritz Brunner, made the necks and carved the lovely scrolls on the Style A's. The later asymmetrical Style As were renamed the Washburn “Deluxe.” From 1928, when Tonk Bros. took over Lyon & Healy but continued production of this instrument line, they were referred to as “Washburn by Tonk Bros.” They were finally discontinued in the 1930s, having a run of less than 20 years.

[Graham McDonald]

Jim.

Thank you again, and to delsbrother for his sage advice. The pdf is downloading as I type

cheers

graham

[brunello97]

Paul,

I can't quite tell from the photos but I imagine the building might have gone through a full facade 'face lift' to be the same as in the photo. The corner windows are different on the newer photo, being two separate windows rather than the common "Chicago Window" horizontal in orientation with two subdivisions as you see in the older photo. The number of 'bays' is the same, as the location of the string course moldings. The newer building has a distinct 'piano nobile' or elaborated second floor, which the older photo lacks. The older photo has attached flat classiscal 'pilasters' in the upper zone of the typical, base-column-shaft set up that many buildings from this era rely on. (And what Louis Sullivan, for instance, worked against.)

Many, many Chicago buildings share these basic features. I'm an architect and many of these things are as tell-tale as binding details, etc. on instruments. I wish I was better at identifying both!

Anyhow, thanks for the addition to the L+H history thread. So much architectural history has been lost in Chicago that it remains fairly hallowed ground.

I hope this thread scares up more background information on this great company.

Mick

[kww]

martinjonasI suspect that Google is filtering IP numbers by country: I get the same as fiddlinfool (in Canada) and Graham (in Australia) -- a useless two-line snippet of the contents of this book with no link or option for getting anything more. It seems to me that Google may only make this file available for users in the US. Anybody outside the US who manages to get this link to work?
The answer from the Netherlands Antilles is "no." Just a useless snippet. If I follow the link that says "back to search results", I get an enormous list of books, but the choice of "Full View" is grayed out in each listing.

Google is great for this kind of thing. I have it set to a preference of Japanese for the interface language, which works fine everywhere but Canada. In Canada, I get the choice of an English screen (from which I can select Japanese) and a French screen (from which I can select Japanese).

[Paul Hostetter]

Martin - it's hard to nitpick when one is a drawing and the other is a photo. Both show exactly the same number of windows in the same configurations of twos and threes, top to bottom, side to side. Just the tile facade from sidewalk to the top of the second story is significantly different. Moreover, the photograph is specifically identified at the Lyon and Healy building and it looks just like the Lyon and Healy I have been in. It's a real institution in Chicago.

[brunello97]

Paul,

I'm no historian, architectural or otherwise, but is seems L+H moved around alot as a business.. In 1916 they moved from their building at State and Monroe to the building on Wabash designed by architects Benjamin Henry Marshall and Charles E. Fox, which I believe your photo is of. Lots of old buildings in the Loop have the same height, size, proportion, window spacing, etc. only the outside 'skin' varying. There is a great book "Form Follows Finance" on the late 19th/early 20th C. development of Chicago buidings and real estate in the Loop. (To an architect's eye the two pictures are as different as a Martin A and a Gibson A.)

Certainly, I've been guilty of not having my buildings appear exactly like my drawings.... so you may be right on, but perhaps what were seeing is two different L+H buildings from two periods of their history. Any idea of the date of the catalog? That ought to resolve the question.

L+H did lose a building during the great Chicago fire, which might be the source of the 'records lost in a fire' rumor, but this was years before their mass mandolin production. They have a new renovated hall over in their HQ on Ogden now, very nice that they are preserving some of their Chicago heritage.

Mick

[keithd]

What a great read - thanks for the link John.

Mick, they really do look like the same building to me (also an architect...); I think the drawings can't be taken too literally. The classical pilasters that figure strongly in the attic story of the drawing appear more subtly in the photo (if thery're there at all).

Someone should re-take the tour today (maybe for Harper's Magazine...); it would make a great sequel, side by side.

[fiddlinfool]

Graham:
I trie to send the file to you but it blunced back since it is prob too big for the current setting of your email.

I uploaded the whole file to this address (http://www.classicalmandolin.net/LHbook/1895_LH.pdf).

Anyone who needs to, feel free to download it. The chapter we are interestde starts on page 362. I tried to extract the pages in Acrobat to make a smaller file, but it did not quite work.

Jim
Jim - thanks for uploading the file - I really appreciate it.
-Scott

[keef]

Great thread!

The Wabash and Jackson building on the catalog and photo is still there and in use with DePaul university since the 1980s.

Good call about Marshall & Fox - they also designed the Drake Hotel.

L&H is located at Randolph and Ogden, but their current premises are not the same as the original factory building from the late 1880.I visited both sites a few weeks ago and have copies of period insurance maps of the Ogden factory.

[brunello97]

Keef,
How is the history of Washburn/L+H book coming along?
Mick

[Rick Turner]

Paul, was Joseph Zorzi the guy who designed the KayKraft two point instruments? That's tickling my brain...and that would have been in 1928 or 29...

[Rick Turner]

Just answered my own question.

Yes:

http://www.wadefx.com/ZorziPage.html

Thank you, Google...

[keef]

Lyon and Healy is doing exactly what it started out doing 116 years ago or so: they make harps.

And they are still at that same location. (http://www.lyonhealy.com/info/dir.html) . . .[/img]

Maybe you did not imply this Paul, but Lyon & Healy did not start by making harps. Their first factory was located in downtown Chicago and opened around 1882. The first L&H harp was not introduced until 1889, in which year a new factory was opened at Randolph and Ogden Ave. As indicated in my earlier post, the current L&H factory and offices are in the same approximate location as the 1889 factory, but NOT in the original building. The original factory was demolished when the Ogden/Randolph street grid was restructured in the 1920s.

If I recall correctly it is claimed that Joseph Zorzi worked at L&H for over twenty years before joining Kay or its predecessor in 1927. For what it's worth, I have a 1916 list of all employees of Lyon & Healy who had been with the company for five years or more, and Zorzi is not on it.

Zorzi may nonetheless have been an employee at L&H, though he did not design the L&H Style A-C mandolins - that was the work of Walter Kirk, who was in charge of all instrument designs for L&H at the time.

The typical 'Zorzi' Kay archtop guitar has a body shape that looks like a variation on the 'reverse scroll' mandolins that Regal made - or rather, another incarnation of Kirk's two point Washburn Style A mandolin. Its bound soundhole and the gold leaf top designs were borrowed from the 1922 Washburn A Style guitar, also a design of Walter Kirk.

[keef]

Keef,
How is the history of Washburn/L+H book coming along?
Mick
Mick:
the book is mostly a description of all Washburn instrument styles made before 1940, but has a chapter on L&H's early history. The designer is working on it now, but I expect that it will take at least half a year before it comes out. My primary goal was to set the record straight in view of the many incorrect statements and popular assumptions about the Washburns and L&H. It's not going to be a glitzy coffee table affair, just a reference source for owners or collectors who are interested in information about their instruments.

I will not refer to the book any more here since I don't want to be accused of spamming.

[brunello97]

Well, Keef, don't worry about any spamming accusations coming from me. You've always seemed very generous with your knowledge, which seems to be the common attitude of sharing here at the MC. Please keep me (us) posted on the book progress, it sounds like a real wealth of useful information. Given L+H's many faceted role in instrument production in the states (and so many different tales that surround it) a comprehensive early history would be a great read and I'm sure well supported here. Particularly if it includes the individuals involved with instrument design and development.

I remember when Sherri Mignano's recent book came out she actually did some low level announcement here (I hope that was considered legit) and even offered MC members a small discount. (Not that I'm suggesting that to you....) Good luck getting through set up and publishing. I can't wait to get a copy.

Mick