- The new Steinway & Sons factory on Fourth Avenue begins to manufacture pianos (even though the family postpones the official opening till the end of summer).
- The factory building is designed in “modern Italian style”, taking up an entire city block, 5 stories high, with additional vast square footage in the basement.
- The walls of the building are up to 2 feet thick, with iron fire doors.
- The factory contains three huge steam boilers in the yard. Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg would not allow fire of any kind inside, except for gas lamps, and heat is provided by 30,000 feet of steam piping. The boilers generate enough steam to warm the entire factory, heat four kilns in which 250,000 feet of lumber dry for three months, power four elevators, and drive the 50 horsepower Corliss engine that runs all the saws, lathes and planes in the basement. Steinway & Sons is the first company in New York to mechanize on such a grand scale, and certainly one of only a few woodworking outfits to use steam power, which, except for transportation, will not be in wide use in America until much later in the century.
- In addition to the factory, the Steinways erect three new brownstone buildings in similar style on 52nd Street: one for Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg and his wife Julianne, one for Henry Steinway, Jr., and the third for William Steinway. The back door to Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg’s house opens to the factory courtyard, and the placing of the three houses allows the owners to enter and exit the factory without being seen by their workers. Charles Steinway eventually will buy a home in the neighborhood. Steinways install a private telegraph line, stretching a galvanized iron wire across rooftops through half the city, between the Fourth Avenue factory and the Walker Street showrooms.