Death and legacy
William Steinway died on November 30, 1896, and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery.40.65155°N, -73.9938°W
Main Street in Astoria has been renamed Steinway Street in his honor, and today a station on the IND Queens Boulevard Line ( trains) is named Steinway Street.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History launched an online edition of "The William Steinway Diary" in December 2010 to coincide with a special display of the diary. The exhibition, titled "A Gateway to the 19th Century: The William Steinway Diary, 1861–1896," was on view in the ⠀⠀Albert H. Small⠀⠀ Documents Gallery from Dec. 17, 2010, through April 8, 2011. In the diaries, Steinway documented more than 36 years of his life through near-daily notes in nine volumes and some 2,500 pages, beginning eight days after the first shots of the Civil War were fired and three days before his wedding. The exhibition of the diary included select diary passages, Steinway family photographs, maps, advertisements, and documentation of his role in the creation of the New York City subway and the company town of Steinway in Queens, N.Y.
Recognizing the diary's historical significance, the late Henry Ziegler Steinway, Steinway's grandson and former president of Steinway & Sons, donated the diary to the museum in 1996. A complete transcription of the diary alongside high-resolution scans of each handwritten page is available on "The William Steinway Diary" website from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The site provides a detailed look at Steinway's firsthand account of the period's financial panics, labor unrest, and rise of the German immigrant class. The primary source material is contextualized with more than 100 images from Steinway family archives and related essays.[5]
