John J. Zeiner & Sons, which has sold, repaired and tuned pianos out of its east Allentown location for more than 100 years, will close later this year.
Jean Zeiner Burch, a store employee and daughter of owner John Zeiner Sr., said the pandemic hit their family business hard, and several family members who helped run the store day-to-day are ready to move on.
Founder Andrew DeLong opened the company in 1912, and the business has stayed in the family since then (John Zeiner Sr. is DeLong’s grandson).
The store is holding a going-out-business sale, and plans to officially close its doors in August or September.
“The hardest thing is to see it end, and to see all the hard work my father put in; I just remember as a little kid, he’d be up at two, three in the morning, getting the business going, and we all kind of fell into it, too,” Burch said.
One of the store’s most reliable clients over the years has been Bethlehem’s MusikFest: it has rented pianos to and tuned pianos for MusikFest concerts since the festival’s inception in 1984. But the festival won’t be affected by the closure this year, Burch said, because the store does not plan to close permanently before the event.
One of the store’s professional piano tuners plans to start his own tuning business, so clients who have long relied on Zeiner’s for tuning services still have someone on which to rely.
Asked if she has a message to the store’s customers, Burch said “thank you to everyone.”
She said, “You deal with thousands of thousands of customers, I’ve been here for 40 some odd years, and there has been very few rude people; the music industry, the people, they’re very nice to deal with.”
Morning Call reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at 610-820-6681 and liweber@mcall.com.