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Mostly Cloudy RVC celebrates summer with explosive sky show
“Fireworks get your heart pumping,” Shannon Morrall said, as she waited outside Mill River Park last Saturday for the first flares of Rockville Centre’s Fireworks Celebration.
Morrall, a Brooklyn resident, said that her friends from Rockville Centre “couldn’t stop talking about these fireworks, so I had to come see them for myself.”
Her verdict: “Mind blowing,” she said. “It must take so much work, and style to create such an artistic display.”
Grace Senken, who will be entering ninth grade in the fall, said that her favorite part of the explosive display were the fireworks during the show’s finale. “They’re the loudest ones, they make your insides shake, because they’re so loud, and they make you so happy,” she said.
Hundreds of locals came out to watch the display. Families filled the park as children dodged in and out of clusters of lawn chairs and blankets. Some waited in line near an ice cream truck. The South Shore Symphony, conducted by Eileen Murphy, played renditions of pop songs, Broadway tunes and patriotic marches, in a nod to Independence Day a few days earlier.
Fireworks by Grucci, a world famous pyrotechnic company, have put on Rockville Centre’s show since 1993. The company set the world record for the largest fireworks display ever recorded, in Dubai in 2013, and have been featured at every presidential inauguration since Ronald Reagan’s in 1981, according to Grucci’s website.
Wayne Lipton, president of the Guild for the Arts, who organized the event, said that Grucci enjoys putting on the RVC show because they get to use shells that explode closer to the ground since the crowd is so close to the launch point.
Saturday’s fireworks cost $25,000, which was paid for mostly by donors, Lipton said. The Guild for the Arts handled the fundraising for the event.
In addition to several major donors, including Rockville Centre Mayor Francis X. Murray and South Nassau Communities Hospital, the Guild received about a hundred smaller donations — between $10 and $250 — and came up short of completely funding the display this year, Lipton added. The village paid the difference.
