For many New Yorkers, it was the showroom that was, and is, captivating. Dr. JoAnn Difede, a psychologist on the faculty of Weill Cornell Medical College, rented an upright piano there several years ago — a Boston, one of Steinway’s two lower-priced brands. Her son Hal Rives showed promise, she said. After six months of renting, they bought it. And last summer Hal, now 14, took a teenage friend who was visiting from Los Angeles to Steinway Hall.

“They went and played the pianos for an hour until someone threw them out,” she said. “It’s an icon. It may not be up there with the Apple store in touristy, but it gets some people there. And it’s a similar concept, the design of a perfect product and the place in which they’re selling it.

“That’s what Steve Jobs understood better than anybody in modern corporate America, and that Steinway got right. The environment in which it’s sold matters.”

But it is an environment on a block that is changing. There was a time when its stretch of West 57th Street “evoked comparison to the elegant Rue de la Paix in Paris,” in the words of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. But now a 1,004-foot-high tower is going up a few doors away from the Steinway building.

That new structure, known as One57, will be one of the city’s tallest. Its prices are high, too: Two duplexes are said to be under contract for more than $90 million apiece. And it was the scene of high drama during Hurricane Sandy when a construction crane snapped and dangled over the street.