About Hickey's Music Center

Hickey's Music Center, founded in 1892, is located in Ithaca, New York amongst the Finger Lakes. We are a full line music service specializing in the print music of all publishers, band, orchestral & popular instruments, accessories for all instruments, high quality instrument repairs, music software and equipment, and most important, friendly service to you, our customer.

We have available to us a virtually unlimited resource of music, instruments and accessories, and keep in stock over 50,000 items for immediate shipment. We routinely stock music most other stores have to special order, and our full line of performance products services the needs of the educational and professional communities both locally and worldwide. We are a regional resource for musical instruments as well, with professional, intermediate and beginner level models from some of the world's top manufacturers. We have regular customers in all 50 states, and many countries around the globe. We would like to make you our next "regular" customer. Browse through our pages and see what our tradition is all about.

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The Legendary Years
Shortly after the piano mishap, the store moved to its famous Tioga Street location, the current site of the county's mental health building. It was here that the store became known throughout the northeastern United States and beyond as *the* location for sheet music. Band, orchestra and choir directors would travel many miles to spend days browsing the "stacks" to select music for their current and future programs. And Saturdays were always a full house. Indeed, many directors were known to stay late after the store closed, literally locking the door on the way out, with the keys and kind permission of the proprietor or his partners, Fred Wilcox or Bob Hedges. Hickey's also became a large mailorder company at this time, shipping music throughout the United States and Canada. But, like many old American institutions, the 1970's brought decline. The selection of music thinned, and non-sheet music products were dropped from the line. By 1987, the store moved to the second floor of the Emporium Building (above Autumn Leaves Bookstore) at 115 The Commons, just across the street from its original location nearly 100 years before.

Changes of Ownership and Revival
In 1988 there was a change of ownership and the venerable old company began the long and difficult process of rebuilding. After two years of cleaning, sorting and much carpentry, a great deal had been accomplished, but much more needed to be done. Later that year our first computer system was installed, a wicked fast 286 running at a blazing 16MHz crunching a dBase accounting package with a whopping 640K of RAM and 40MB hard drive (ahh, the good ol days!). In 1990, the current ownership took over and within a year moved the store to its present location in the Ithaca Calendar Clock Factory, continuing the rebuilding process started two years earlier. Soon, accessory items were being stocked again and sold at a serious discount, along with long absent keyboards, guitars and percussion. A year or two later found the store with many major instrument lines, including Armstrong, Artley, Bach, Buffet, Cannonball, Conn, King, Selmer, Schroetter and Yamaha.

The Internet Age
In 1993, the Internet was opened to commercial traffic and the World Wide Web was established. A few months later (and 102 years after our founding) Hickey's became a "Dot Com" with the appearance of our first website, a large scale multi-page affair offering a fair percentage of the items in our then 20,000+ piece catalog. Indeed, that first website was one of the first internet catalogs of any type anywhere in the world. In the intervening years, more departments have been brought online, from Percussion and Pop Music to Orchestral Scores. Today, our website continues to grow, offering at current over 45,000 hand selected items, plus the nearly infinite resources of our vendors and partners. In 2001, responding to increased mail order traffic, the store expanded, moving into and remodeling an empty section of our building and opening a mailorder warehouse. Attached to the warehouse is "Dilbertville," our mailorder office complete with the requisite cubicle dividers (sans "Wally") where we handle all of your orders each day.