Johnson County is losing its only place to buy a Steinway & Sons piano.
After a five-year run, the New York-based piano-making company is winding down operations at its Lenexa gallery and showroom.
Steinway is at 9512 Marshall Drive
- The showroom occupied a space just off I-35 and 95th Street in Lenexa.
- There, it operated next to Chinese restaurant Monkey King BBQ & Noodle.
- The shopping center is also near Costco, just across 95th Street.
- The space now occupied by Steinway was previously a laundromat and a dry cleaning facility.
Steinway opened in Lenexa in August 2021
When Steinway came to Johnson County, it was on the heels of Schmitt Music’s 2020 closure in Overland Park, which had been an authorized Steinway piano dealer since the 1990s.
Steinway offers both brand new and newly-restored used pianos. The Lenexa location also showcases Steinway’s Spirio pianos, which can play themselves with the help of digital software.
For five years, the Lenexa gallery and showroom has been the only authorized distributor for Steinway pianos in not just Johnson County, but the wider Kansas City metro area.
It’s been a five-year run that Gordon McNelly, local owner and operator of the Lenexa store, describes as “turbulent”.
That’s for a variety of reasons. For one, the acoustic piano industry has been suffering as a whole, going back multiple decades.
There was a bit of a boost in interest during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, McNelly said, when everyone wanted “pianos, puppies and Pelotons.” Then things took another dive as pandemic attitudes shifted.
At the same time, Kansas City has a relatively robust selection of places to get digital pianos; ones that come at a lower cost and take less to maintain than an acoustic Steinway.
“Post COVID, the piano industry still hasn’t really gotten its sea legs yet,” McNelly said. “The acoustic piano business in the entire country is down significantly, quite honestly, going back several years.”
And then there’s the factor that McNelly said was the biggest in the Lenexa showroom’s closure — fewer schools and universities than ever are investing in pianos as they downsize their music programs or cut them entirely.
“Universities are struggling with decreasing enrollment, increasing costs, threats of funding from the government if certain programs exist or don’t exist,” McNelly said. “So there’s a lot of pressure that universities have to navigate through. That honestly trickles down into the fact that a very, very significant portion of the business that we rely on is essentially non-existent.”
Steinway will have one more big sales weekend
From Friday to Sunday, customers who are looking for one more chance to invest in a Steinway piano will have the chance to do so at a significant discount.
The Lenexa showroom will offer piano liquidation sales by appointment on Friday and Saturday — for which McNelly said appointments are already almost completely full.
“We’ve got a showroom full of pianos for people that are going to be offered at discounted prices exclusively for this (weekend),” he said.
On Sunday, the sales will open back up to the public (first come, first serve).
If any pianos remain after the weekend wraps up, the store will stay open either until Steinway’s lease ends at the end of November, or until pianos last.
“If anybody was considering getting a new instrument for their home, this will certainly be the best time,” McNelly said. “We’re basically going into three months of probably one of the best buying opportunities that the area will ever see.”
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