Piano Crawler: A Unique Occupation in Old Boston
A piano crawler is a very strong man who crawls up or down stairs with a piano on his back. I’m not kidding. I once worked with a guy whose dad was a retired piano crawler in Boston.
Piano crawlers worked for moving companies. When a moving company had a job that involved a piano going in or out of an upper story, they would call him. He would get down on all fours and the movers would lift the piano onto his back. He would then ascend or descend the stairs while the other workers kept the piano balanced on his back. It was cheaper than the classic method of hoisting pianos up the outside of the building and then swinging them in through a window.
Boston is, of course, an old city and many of the old buildings have very narrow winding staircases and no elevators. I don’t know if piano crawlers are still in use. I suspect they have found a more high-tech way of doing this by now that is cheaper. Probably, OSHA safety rules and the consideration of what your workers’ compensation insurance would cost if you employed piano crawlers have motivated moving companies to end the practice of piano crawling.
Another interesting fact about these old staircases is this: Structural engineers have told me that they absolutely cannot analyze why these old wooden winding staircases in the old buildings don’t fall down. By the formulas and methods of formal analysis engineers learn in school, these staircases have no right to be doing what they do, given how they are put together.
The old carpenters who built these staicases 100 and more years ago had their tricks, handed down through the generations of their craft, to make the support pieces fit together and lay one upon another around the turns such that they do hold up — and defy conventional analysis in the process. Of course, (continued below ad for this recommended book which is kind of a layman’s guide to structural engineering)
the reason these staircases came up in conversation with structural engineers in my former line of work as a consultant doing housing rehab is that these staircases often sag. I would ask the engineer what was the cause of the sag, and the answer would invariably be something like: “The question is not why its sagging. The question is how the hell it didn’t fall down the first time a heavy load was put on it.”
Maybe it was my friend’s dad with a piano on his back that put some of those staircases into their saggy condition.
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I think it’s nice that they now have gender-specific warginns, even if one of them does make ciggies sounds like a form of birth control.I used to work just up the road from St Pauls, right opposite St Clements Danes and next to the Law Courts. Summer days were wonderful for hanging around outside for a smoke break, watching the LSE students wander past and reading the wall plaques about the suffragette movement etc., then wandering round to the Old Bank Of England pub for lunch … now that’s a pub really worth a visit for their beer + grub + extraordinarily extravagent decor (or just Google it of course). It’s built on the site of Mrs Miggin’s Pie Shop and Sweeney Todd’s barber shop (also worth a Google). Further west is the Coal Hole pub, in the basement of which I proposed to my wife! They ought to make that a historic monument. What can I say, I’m a classy guy.Somewhere around there by the river is Marconi House — back in the early days of telephones if you were in Singapore and called Australia the call was routed by real live operators in that building.Anyway, it all gives you a great sense of being surrounded by history. And how about a SPOILER ALERT on the movie plots, Mr Kyte .. sheesh!