The Piano Graveyard

At Beethoven’s five-story warehouse in the Bronx, pianos await restoration and repainting. Instruments too damaged to fix are doomed to the “piano graveyard.”
NYT.

Phil and I were boyhood friends. When we grew up we decided to start an agency together that looked for lost items.

We called ourselves "Lost Then Found."

We tracked down a set of priceless Tiffany blintz warmers that mysteriously disappeared from an elegant Long Island mansion one foggy night in 2010. Turns out the warmers had been mistaken for finger bowls by a new maid, who put them in a burlap bag and stored them in the basement. That little caper netted us a paragraph in the New York Post.

We also rediscovered the fabled Parking Meters of Dixon County. Covered by flood waters back in 1965, the Meters were thought to have been destroyed, and their precious cache of dimes lost forever. But Phil and I, working off a tip from an old farmer, managed to find them sunk in a duck pond outside of Paragould, Arkansas. We were runners-up for a Peabody Award for that adventure.

One day, about a year ago, Phil strolls into the office and asks me:
"You ever hear of the 'Piano Graveyard?'
"Some" I replied carelessly. "Bit of a fairy tale, ain't it?"
For answer, Phil threw a newspaper on my desk, with a circled article that spoke vaguely of a 'Piano Graveyard' somewhere in the Bronx.
"Looks like a bit of a woolly mammoth to me" I told him. Phil had that green sparkle in his eyes that foretold an obsessive search was in the cards for the two of us.
"Who's gonna pay for us to find this place?" I asked him querulously. "It'll take a heap of mazuma to outfit an expedition to the Bronx . . . "
"I've borrowed on our life insurance policies" he said blithely.
"You fool!" I exploded. "You know that money was to get our ears pierced!" But my anger quickly evaporated; his boyish grin of excitement was too infectious. The next day we mounted the 'A' train to confront a howling wilderness that the natives called the Bronx.

Of the hardships and dangers from dysentery, bedbugs, squeegees, and treacherous docents, I write nothing. Suffice it to say that by the time we staggered into the "Piano Graveyard" we were mere  scarecrows, hardly able to stand up.
"We made it, pal" Phil croaked to me.
"Looks like it" I replied in a chipper whisper, as my left arm fell off from a lingering case of gangrene. 
Before us stretched a weird panorama of derelict Yamaha concert grands, abused Steinways, and disemboweld Bechsteins. Rusty piano wire festooned the ground like jungle vines. 

And there before our bloodshot eyes was the payoff, the glorious reward for our pain and suffering -- acre upon acre of ivory keys, sticking stiffly out of the shattered remains.


When we finally got back to civilization with our sacks of piano keys, which we nearly lost to dacoits while going over the Khyber Pass, our exploits went viral on social media. But the two of us had already agreed that we cared nothing for the limelight, so we grew long beards and wore putty noses to put the paparazzi off the scent. Prudently investing our hard-earned wealth in quail egg futures, Phil and I bought a small island off the coast of Albania, where we wiped out a nest of pirates and are now settled down as colliers, makers of a boutique charcoal used exclusively to roast Nubian goat meat. 

It's a simple life, but highly satisfying. Still, old work habits die hard. If you've lost something important, like your car keys or the first century BC recipe for garum, give us a call and we might find time to look into the matter for you . . .