A historically crowd-pleasing music festival on the cusp of its 61st year in Glen Cove has announced that the show won’t go on due to concerns over safety measures.
The committee for the Morgan Park Summer Music Festival announced in an emailed statement that its 2020 season of free concerts in the park has been canceled.
Efforts to hold the festival this year, the statement said, saw the organizers coordinate with the City of Glen Cove, the Glen Cove Police Department and Nassau County, “each of which worked closely with the committee to establish rigorous protocols to assure a safe summer concert season for Long Island audiences.”
“Unfortunately the safety protocols established were rejected by New York State,” the statement said, leading to the event’s cancelation.
U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove), whose parents, Joseph and Marguerite Suozzi, were instrumental in the festival’s founding and evolution, chaired the committee that organizes the festival.
In a phone call Wednesday morning, Suozzi said the cancellation was “another sad casualty of the coronavirus,” and said that the board had been through a process of deciding protocols to take in order to hold the festival in a socially distant fashion.
“We’d laid out a whole season [of performers], and our board went through a whole deliberative process to lay out these protocols,” Suozzi said.
He said that plans included having circles on the lawn to accommodate social distancing, as well as having hand sanitizer, restroom attendants and signs describing the rules.
Seating, he said, could have accommodated “over 800 people, socially distanced.”
“We had worked with the city [of Glen Cove], as well as Nassau County, then we went to the state and it just wasn’t possible to do,” Suozzi said. “They’ve already said no to graduations and other events. But even with these protocols it just wasn’t possible.”
Organizers said in a statement that they will be corresponding with donors who contributed to the support of the 2020 summer season, and that they are offering to either return their donation or apply this support to the 2021 season, as they prefer.
The festival, which marked its 60th anniversary last year, is a not-for-profit organization, administered by an all-volunteer team to present free concerts in Morgan Park each summer and funded entirely through tax-deductible contributions by businesses and individuals.
This year, six concerts had been lined up through the end of July and all of August. Performers were to include tribute bands for the Grateful Dead, Jimmy Buffett and the Partridge Family, as well as a salsa orchestra, a country band, and a journey through American folk music.
Suozzi added that while he understood the state’s reasons for refusal, he was “sad” over the cancellation, and that it brought to mind what his mother, a longtime chairperson of the event, would say when the festival faced adverse conditions.
“My mom would always say, whenever there was bad weather, the show must go on,” Suozzi said. “So that was what was guiding us, and we really had a great team effort to do it along with us.”
