“John Paulson has a plan for the historic Steinway piano factory in Queens—and it involves sharing some of the premises with Robert De Niro,” write Lori Weiss and Carleton English in Thursday’s (6/13) New York Post. “The billionaire hedge-fund mogul—who scooped up Steinway & Sons in 2013 for $512 million, and who is now reportedly looking to flip it for as much as $1 billion—has agreed to sell nearly half of the piano maker’s 11-acre lot to a group that includes De Niro for $73 million.” De Niro and his business partners plan “to develop a 500,000-square-foot film studio, a pre- and post-production office and parking area on the Astoria lot…. ‘This land is excess property that was not being used for the production of our pianos,’ [said] a Steinway spokesman…. ‘Steinway has built the world’s finest pianos on this site since the early 1870s and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.’… ‘My goal in owning Steinway is to first of all preserve it,’ Paulson said [when he bought the firm], adding he had no plans to move production out of its current factories in Astoria and Hamburg, Germany…. Steinway has been consolidating its footprint in Astoria.”
Posted June 18, 2019
