The Lost Pianos of Pioneer Square: A Short History of Piano Culture in Early Seattle

In the 1880s, getting a piano to Seattle was a serious undertaking. These instruments — some weighing over a thousand pounds — arrived by ship around Cape Horn or by rail once the transcontinental routes were completed. Each one represented a significant investment and a statement of intent: wherever this piano ended up, civilization was putting down roots.

Seattle in the 1880s was a booming lumber town, rough around the edges but growing fast. Pianos showed up in two very different kinds of places. In the parlors of the city's growing middle class, an upright piano was a centerpiece of family life — a source of entertainment, education, and social status. In the saloons and dance halls along the waterfront and in what would become Pioneer Square, pianos served a different purpose entirely. They were workhorses, banged on nightly by hired musicians playing for loggers, miners, and sailors looking for a good time.

The Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889, destroyed most of the central business district. Twenty-five blocks burned, including much of Pioneer Square and the commercial waterfront. How many pianos were lost is impossible to say, but given the density of saloons, hotels, boarding houses, and homes in the burned area, the number was likely significant. These were instruments that had traveled thousands of miles to get here, and they were gone in an afternoon.

The city rebuilt quickly — in brick and stone this time instead of wood — and pianos came flooding back in. The 1890s and early 1900s saw a national boom in piano ownership, and Seattle was no exception. Music stores opened downtown. Piano teachers advertised in the newspapers. The instrument became a fixture of middle-class life in the growing city.

By the early 1900s, Seattle had multiple piano dealers, and the region's connection to the instrument was well established. Some of those pianos from the turn of the century are still around — I've encountered instruments with Seattle provenance going back to the 1890s. They've passed through families, been sold at estate sales, sat in churches, ended up in storage, and occasionally found their way back to someone who recognizes what they have.

There's a thread that connects those early pianos arriving by ship to the instruments sitting in living rooms across the Seattle area today. The impulse to have music in the home, to give children lessons, to gather around the piano on a weekend — that hasn't changed in 140 years. The instruments have gotten better, the city has gotten bigger, but the role of the piano in the home is remarkably unchanged.

If you've got an old piano with a story behind it, I'd love to hear it sometime. The history of pianos in this region is the history of the people who played them.