Just recently, I attended the 2011 Smart Growth Summit Long Island – a series of workshops and panels organized by Vision Long Island focused on sustainable economic growth. One of the panels focused on “Components of Great Places: Food, Arts, Music & Destinations.”
The panel highlighted how a restaurant or a theater can create a sense of place, turn a dying town into a destination and ignite economic revitalization. Think of Lenox, Massachusetts, a sleepy nothing of a village that draws tens of thousands of people on the strength of its cultural attractions including Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, the Norman Rockwell Museum, Herman Melville’s Arrowwood and Edith Wharton’s The Mount.
Westhampton Beach was hailing a performing arts center as the anchor for activity throughout the year in downtown. “The $18 million project represents both economic revitalization and the opportunity to strengthen a growing arts community,” one speaker said.
I thought of that as this year’s Great Neck Arts Center gala, held at New York Institute of Technology’s magnificent de Seversky Mansion in Old Westbury,attended by a veritable who’s who of the Great Neck Peninsula, North Hempstead and Nassau County, for the most part who appreciate the importance of the arts to a community and specifically, the importance of an arts center to economic vitality.
Among those who attended was Saddle Rock Mayor Dan Levy, who describes himself as a fan of the arts center. Earlier this year, the village eliminated its $2,000 allocation to the arts center even as the longtime Mayor J. Leonard Samansky, a founding director and consummate supporter of the arts center, was being honored with the establishment of a performing arts scholarship in his name (Mayor Levy notes that the board took its action under Mayor Samansky.)
Similarly, the Village of Great Neck also cancelled its funding of the arts center this year, following Thomaston, Russell Gardens (which ended its support when Daniel Nachmanoff stepped down as mayor). Kensington and Kings Point (no surprise there) have never provided an allocation.
Only three villages – Great Neck Plaza, Lake Success and Great Neck Estates – continue to support the arts center.
In all, the village contributions were a tiny fraction of Great Neck Arts Center’s budget and their stipends were a mere fraction – hardly a make-or-break for anyone – of each of the village’s budgets. In Saddle Rock, the $2,000 amounted to 0.2% of the budget. The allocations were a gesture, a demonstration, a symbol of support.
“The loss of these monies, which vary from village to village, from $500 – $2,500, is certainly not a significant loss to the budget of the arts center, which tops $1 million,” says Regina Gil, the founder and executive director of the Great Neck Arts Center. “However, the inability to include Great Neck the Greater (as former Plaza Mayor Bob Rosegarten used to call it) as grassroots support for this arts center, the only one of its kind in Nassau County, hurts us as we write grants and seek support elsewhere. We are always asked where our funding and support comes from. When Great Neck doesn’t support the Great Neck Arts Center, what are we to conclude from that?”
Mayor Levy justified ending the village’s long, longtime support saying that the village attorney ruled it was “illegal to make a charitable contribution.” So for all these years, Mayor Samansky did something illegal? How was it legal for 18 years, but not legal now?
Charity? What charity? The support the villages provided was in the form of a contract, and each village was entitled to some kind of service in kind: they could have asked (and the arts center has offered) for an exhibit, a concert, they could have asked for discounts for their residents for tickets to the art center’s phenomenal Furman Film Series or concerts (everyone can go for free to the gallery exhibits, which feature world-class artists as well as emerging artists, and if you don’t attend the opening receptions, it’s your fault entirely). They could even have asked for discounts for their residents’ to take classes with a catalog of offerings as rich and varied as a college catalog, and programs from toddler to seniors.
When we asked Great Neck Village Mayor Ralph Kreitzman what the rationale was for the village ending its $2,000 participation, he responded, “We need to do more with less.”
More with less? Where is the more? We see the less.
The Old moribund Village of Great Neck has the basic elements for an arts destination – it has Great Neck House where there are movies, concerts and lectures about three days a week, plus the Music Center – but seems absolutely determined to keep the Old Village as dead and boring as it possibly can be.
The Old comatose Village offers the clearest demonstration of what it means to lack of imagination. Isn’t it amazing that the Great Neck Park District holds outdoor movies and Rotary band concerts every other Wednesday in summer, but not a single shop is clever enough to stay open, much less organize a sidewalk sale, or a single eaterie creative enough to sell a picnic dinner?
There are movies, lectures, concerts at least three days a week during most of the year at Great Neck House, yet when you leave a movie at 9:30, there isn’t a single place to get an ice cream or a coffee (you have to drive two miles up to Great Neck Plaza for that).
The singular event that raises money for the Old tired Village is the annual crafts fair. You would think that seeing the success of that event, the village would do a better job of organizing similar events – such as a Greenwich Village-style art show (we understand that the arts center has proposed just such an event) on the Village Green, or if not possible (because of archaic rules about commerce in a public park), then in the village parking lots that are otherwise nearly empty anyway.
One could argue that Saddle Rock canceled its support because the village believes it does not benefit directly from an arts center in another village. Au contraire.
The Great Neck Arts Center, along with the movie theater and restaurants and all the vibrant programs that the visionary Great Neck Plaza board organizes (the summertime Promenades, summertime concerts in the park, Autofest, Restaurant Week) gives all of us on the peninsula a “happening” place to go within biking distance (though hardly anyone does that). I’m quite sure that Saddle Rock residents also take classes, go to concerts, visit the gallery exhibits, attend lectures, and if they are truly clever, take advantage of the Furman Film Series.
Great Neck Plaza, thankfully, has appreciated what it means to have an arts center in its village.
“It is a tremendous asset to have the arts center in the Plaza,” said Village of Great Neck Plaza Mayor Jean Celender, who also attended the Smart Growth Summit session on “place making.” “It tells the community, the region that we value art. It’s an important indicator of an educated community, an enlightened community. It’s a marvelous asset to give kids and adults a place to nurture their creativity and experience all the arts have to offer, from classes to performances.
“It also is an economic engine,” Celender added. “The center brings in people who come to participate in these events and classes, and they stay and shop in our downtown. It adds foot traffic to the community, which is part of economic revitalization – and is also why the public art we do is important. If you can get people to enjoy, look, linger, they stay longer and that translates into sales.”
That’s the spirit behind the Plaza’s “public arts” program – the trompe d’oeil on Maple has become a destination in its own right, and the village recently installed a mosaic – a landscape of Steppingstone Park, as it turns out – at the Long Island Railroad Station.
What is said of music – “Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul” – can also be said of art.
You’d think the rest of the villages would want some of that. How about a traveling art show in the stores along Great Neck Estates’ shopping strip? A dance performance on Kensington’s green? An art exhibit to decorate the Village Hall at Lake Success? An arts day at Saddle Rock pool?
The arts are everywhere getting short-shrift. Usually characterized as “frivolous” and “nonessential” (or in the case of Saddle Rock Mayor Dan Levy, “charity”) – they are among the first to go when municipalities as well as school districts are in a budget crunch.”
Gil notes that last year alone,10 percent of all arts organizations across the country shut down – that’s 100,000 ballet companies, opera companies, theaters, and on and on and on.
Yet the arts are a vital component – not “frivolous” at all – for individuals for whom the arts enhances learning and human development and provides creative expression and a source of self-esteem; for societies which are enriched by the arts, and for the economy, because the arts are an engine for economic development.
Consider this: America’s biggest export (after military armaments) is entertainment; the entertainment business represents 5 percent of Gross Domestic Product. That’s the macro-side.
Our entire community benefits richly from having the arts center here – it literally puts us on the map, especially with last year’s Gold Coast International Film Festival that will become an annual event, hopefully to someday rival the Tribeca Film Festival. Last year, 15,000 people – coming from New York City and all over Long Island and beyond – attended the screenings and previews and presentations by filmmakers, and each one spent money in the town, at restaurants, shops, even parking and traveling, which benefits us all.
We also benefit from the extraordinary range of programs that are available to us at the arts center – the quality of artists and filmmakers and performers who come to perform, lecture, discuss, present, teach. The range of programs – from womb to tomb, as Gil says – are extraordinary as well, especially for pre-schoolers who get a rich introduction to music and art when their brains are forming and are most receptive; there are children’s programs during school vacations and even drop-off programs..
Just the Furman Film Series (now part of the Gold Coast International Film Festival) alone is phenomenal – a chance to see major films before they are released, and be able to have a conversation with someone connected with it (Eli Wallach, Joan Allen, the director of “Freedom Writers” to list but a few). You would have to travel and pay a pretty penny for a similar program in Manhattan. And this is right in our own neighborhood.
Being an economic engine and sparking the vitality of the community are significant benefits, but having an arts center here has significant human benefits, as well.
We are blessed in that our community (so far) supports our schools so that we can maintain a strong arts programs, but even our schools do not necessarily have the specialized programs or the advanced training that is available at the arts center, and access in groups and even one-on-one to working professionals who are the teachers. The arts center offers such specialties as ballet (the schools don’t offer that), and voice training for Broadway (Kate Steinberg, who was just hired as a vocal teacher, grew up in Great Neck, attended Great Neck South -she was Fontine in “Les Mis” – studied from the age of 5 at the Great Neck Arts Center),
We hear how important it will be in the “global economy” of the future to “think outside the box” and how desperately we need “creative solutions.” I would submit that with more and more of our school curriculums dictated by standardized testing, we will see less opportunity for such creative expression and novel solutions, even if budgets are not so strapped that art and music programs have to be ditched.
Arts provide a different platform for learning. Some children find it easier to learn that Columbus sailed the sea in 1492, which bones are connected to which, or what the names of the chemical elements are by singing it. Children with attention deficit disorder and other special needs can learn more effectively through art or music or performance.
But it is also shown that language and music are most easily learned before the age of six. Moreover, acquiring music and language at this young age causes the brain to form cells and connections that lay the foundation for learning and retaining other knowledge.
Seeing Great Neck South’s production of “Cabaret” and North High’s production of “Les Mis,” you can also appreciate how they offer a different way to understand history and social and cultural issues (think “West Side Story,” “South Pacific,” “King and I”).
We also hear how our country is desperate for engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs who can find new solutions to problems – that means thinking out of the box, being creative, not blindly following or accepting what came before. Art nurtures that kind of creativity and originality. Ballet, and dance and performing arts teach self-discipline as well as teamwork.
It also provides an alternate way to acquire and retain information, to lay connections in the brain for learning.
But being successful in art, and being able to express yourself through art chases the demons that tend to invade young people, giving them a source of accomplishment that builds self-esteem and strengthens their sense of self-worth and identity so they do not give way to destructive forces.
During the Great Neck Historical Society’s program about Spinney Hill, I was struck by what was said about the community center there, in the 1960s, and how the opportunity to perform theater and play music gave youngsters this constructive outlet, several of whom went on to pursue careers in the arts.
From 1996-2002, the arts center provided art teachers to work with kids at Spinney Hill’s High Street Community Center.
“The stipulation was that students who wanted to participate had to have their school teacher sign a document that they did their homework,” Gil said. “Teachers reported that the kids were so anxious for this opportunity, they not only did their homework but were doing better than the rest of the class.”
The Great Neck Arts Center also has become a regional outreach program, offering intergenerational programs and arts education in schools in many school districts. Its scholarship programs, such as the newly established J. Leonard Samansky Scholarship for the Performing Arts, have enabled talented youngsters who otherwise could not afford lessons, to fulfill their potential.
“I’m here to raise the tide for everybody,” Gil said.
And here, it is appropriate to observe many who have drawn connections between arts education and reduced violence – probably because youths have more constructive outlets.
“Art is transformative,” Gil said, quoting Jane Alexander, the actress and former director of the National Endowment for the Arts, who said “If you put a paintbrush or oboe in the hands of a seven year-old, that same child, at the age of 13, will not pick up an Uzi”
It says a lot about the quality of the arts center that the Great Neck Arts Center has become an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts: Partners in Education program, which means it provides professional arts education for art educators including the Great Neck schools, and is also an affiliate of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Well, as in the theater, with this metaphorical slap in the face by villages pulling their modest allocation, the Great Neck Arts Center isn’t exactly feeling the love of the Great Neck community, if we can still be called that.
Everyone on Long Island got pretty hysterical because Charles Wang threatened to move his major league hockey team off the Island. What if the Great Neck Arts Center was recruited to move to a community with a greater appreciation for what it offers its residents and business community?
If you thought losing Millie’s was a catastrophe (we have never recovered such a popular, leading-edge restaurant), losing the Great Neck Arts Center would be a monumental disaster.
Like Van Gogh, it would be a real tragedy if we all started appreciating the Great Neck Arts Center after it was gone.
