Home                            Americana Style Ballpoint $55/Leatherette Case (Parker type refill)

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America's Music

This Old Stage

    The Boston Symphony Orchestra is proud to offer this limited edition, hand-turned and polished pen crafted from the original floorboards of Symphony Halls's historic stage.

    During the summer of 2006 the Symphony Hall stage floor was replaced for the first time in the hall's 105 year history. The original floor had become uneven, squeaky and close to buckling in some places-a result of more than a century's worth of wear and tear.

    In a effort to maintain Symphony Hall's existing acoustics, the stage floor was disassembled and replaced using techniques and materials employed when the Hall was originally constructed in 1900. The original stage floor was hard maple, tongue-in-groove, three-quarters of an inch thick; the new floor is also hard maple of the same shape and thickness. The new flooring arrived at the Hall early in the summer in order to acclimate it to the building's temperature and humidity, which were monitored carefully throughout the project. Nobody knows exactly how many layers of varnish and polyurethane were applied to the original floor to give its deep carmel color. Because the new floor was not stained, it is much lighter in color. No changed were made to the angled rough planks of the sub-floor or to the supporting structural system. The layers of felt between the floor and sub-floor, installed to minimize squeaking, was carefully replicated as well. Hand-cut nails of the same type and size used in the original construction were employed in the same pattern and were hand-pounded as they would have been more than a century ago.

Photograph by P. Litke, courtesy of the BSO Archives