APRIL 2014 | BOROMAG.COM | 29 After Jack’s wife left the property in the 1970’s, his son Michael took over caretaker responsibilities for the estate. As a retired owner of a Manhattan restaurant, Michael was financially unstable under the weights of property taxes and upkeep. He first considered selling in 1993. Michael was unable to bring himself to sell the home that his family had maintained for so long and would not end up listing the home for another seventeen years. Today, 90 years after the head Halberian purchased the home, the property stands weathered and somewhat of a neighborhood mystery. In 2010, Michael Halberian officially put the house on the market. The initial asking price for the home was $5 million. After several price fluctuations, the latest asking price was $1.9 million for divided plots. Michael died still under the weight of the responsibility of maintaining his father’s dream home. He died in that home, just like his father before him. Before his death, he was meeting regularly with city councilmen to figure out how the property might be used, and paid for, by the community. Though the area has fallen on hard times and the property is but a glimpse of what it once stood as and stood for, the walls that the Pikes built still stand around the home that the Halberians kept in the community that the Steinways birthed. Before Michael’s death in late 2010, he wished for ownership to be passed on to someone who wished to ensure that the mansion survive and be rejuvenated. In 1993 he expressed hopes that he can either find an organization like the Queens Historical Society to maintain the mansion as a museum or someone who is willing to protect it as he had. Unfortunately for Michael and the community, those wishes never became a reality. The property which includes among other things, five bedrooms, a grotto, a tower, a pub, a billiard room, a sauna, and a hot tub flanked by lion, has recently come under contract with a private buyer. Although the closing of the estate may be soon approaching, preservations group “Friends of Steinway Mansion” are still trying to acquire the property to make it accessible to the public as a museum and learning center. The Steinway Mansion sits at 18-33 41st Street (between 19th Avenue and Berrian Boulevard). The estate boasts some of the only greenery in the now industrialized area near Laguardia Airport. Much like the final lyrics of Billy Joel’s song written on the Steinway & Sons piano, anyone who ever owned the mansion proved to be unable to live without it. Pike, Steinway, and both Halberians all died in the mysterious home in Astoria, Queens. “She’s got a way about her, I don’t know what it is, but I know that I can’t live without her anyway.” The song and the history of this home fade to silence with the same note that they started on.
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