Take my piano, please!

In a city that once churned them out, more and more folks seek to turn them out

When Joe Curry moved into his Mission Hill apartment, the piano was there already. It was an old upright model, the type that was common a century ago.

For a while, Curry, 21, thought it gave the place a sense of class. Then he thought it was just taking up space. Last week he finally posted an ad to craigslist.com: PIANO! TAKE IT OR IT'S TRASH.

Then he noticed that he wasn't the only one looking to unload a piano.

"So many people are trying to get rid of them," he said.

The city, it seems, bleeds pianos: a spinet for sale in Dorchester, a player piano offered up in Eastie; an upright resting curbside in Brighton, another hunkered down in a third-floor Jamaica Plain walk-up.

You can look at all those pianos and trace the outline of a vanished past, a Boston now long gone.

A hundred years ago, Boston was home to dozens of piano companies turning out hundreds of gleaming instruments a year, each one stamped with its maker's name: Mason and Hamlin, Chickering and Sons, Henry F. Miller, Ivers & Pond, Vose & Sons, and many more. .

At the industry's height there were as many as 26 piano companies in Boston, said Paul Murphy, president of the piano dealership M. Steinert and Sons, which began as a manufacturer.

"I think it's because Boston was a mature city," Murphy said. "And the institutions of higher learning were here as well."

From the manufacturers, pianos spilled out into the parlors of houses and three-deckers across the growing city.

Even in the poorest neighborhoods, people had pianos. Instead of the television, families gathered around the keyboard. Instead of MP3s, they would buy and share the latest sheet music out of Tin Pan Alley.

"Everyone had a parlor upright piano instead of a TV," said Jude Reveley, of Absolute Piano Restoration in Lowell.

It was only later in the century that recordings, radio, and TV changed how people listen to music, Reveley said, making it "less social, and more individual."

"You put on your headphones or your iPod, and everything is more introverted," Reveley said, "whereas before it was linked to the community."

That's how it was for Brenda Doyle's family.

When Doyle, 50, of Cambridge, was growing up, her aunt played the piano when the family gathered. In her aunt's generation, Doyle said, "I think every family probably had someone who could play well enough, who knew the songs they all knew."

But then, she said, "we got a TV, and that was the beginning of the end of the piano thing. . . . I've had it now all these years. My kids refused to take lessons."

Doyle's piano is for sale on craigslist. No bites yet, she said.

Pianos stick, long after they've gone silent. They're heavy - 300 or 400 pounds - bulky and expensive to move. Families leave them behind, a gift for the next tenant, like Curry's old upright.

Other pianos circulate around the city for years, slowly getting more and more decrepit.

David Brandwein, 21, got his piano three years ago, for free, from a man who'd inherited it from his mother. Brandwein used the piano in a homemade recording studio he and some fellow Berklee students set up, where it leant an old-timey atmosphere. "It's a honky-tonk kind of piano sound," he said.

Now that he's moving to New York, he's trying to find the instrument a new home.

"You can't exactly go throw a piano out on the street," he said.

Joe Allonby, who works for Deathwish Piano Movers, an Allston-based company that has been moving pianos since 1971, said he often finds himself moving the same instrument more than once, a few years apart.

Other times he arrives to move a piano only to find it's been "remodeled into the building": Windows have been removed, stairs replaced, and the piano can no longer come out the way it came in. When that happens, the piano comes out in pieces.

A musician himself, Allonby tries to rescue the odd piano when he can by finding it a good home.

"I like the fact that you can have something that's in some cases over 100 years old, and not only is it a working instrument but a really good instrument," he said. "It's kind of fascinating."

Reveley said he shares the fascination. He got interested in old pianos as a Berklee student when, sick of having to wait to use the school's pianos, he spent a month's rent on a "junky old upright."

"I spent the first night just looking at it," he remembered. "I was just mesmerized by this huge piece of furniture . . . and the fact that it was attached to this whole different era of history. Where had this piano been? What musician had played on it? It's got a soul, an aura to it."

Today, Reveley is one of the few piano restorers in Boston who specializes in refurbishing completely gutted instruments from the inside out. The process is expensive: a typical rebuild costs $30,000. His clients tend to be professional pianists. For most people, those old upright pianos aren't worth the expense of restoration, he said.

"Most of them are really toast already," he said.

At Deathwish, Allonby said he's noticed more traffic in old pianos in recent years. People are cleaning out their apartments and getting rid of them, he said.

"Unfortunately a lot of them are going to the dump," Allonby said. "A lot of them have been in basements for decades and they're just beyond redemption."

Someday the pianos of the early 20th century will be gone, joining the clothes, books, toys, tools, and all the other detritus of the past. But not yet.

In an apartment in Allston, Chuck Boudreau, who also works for Deathwish, is holding tight to a piano with all his strength. It's half-in, half-out of a second-story window that's had the casement taken off it; workers are attaching a crane to the half of the piano that's outside the building.

This is how the Deathwish crew got the piano into this apartment three years ago, and this is how, they hope, they're going to get it back out.

"All set?" Boudreau shouts. Gingerly, he starts to let go.

In the parking lot below, the piano's new owner waits. Jeff Carroll, 39, just moved into a house in Needham. "I have two little kids . . . and I live next door to a piano teacher. Things might work out."

Above his head, Boudreau lets go. Hoisted in a sling, the piano floats out into the air.