By:JOSEPH KELLARD
This is like another home for me, and they-re taking it away, said Margaret Chestler as she played bingo at the senior center last Thursday. This is something that belongs to Island Park.
I-ve been coming here for about 18 years, and we-ve come to depend on it, said fellow member Sally Collins.
Housed at the American Legion Post for its entire 27-year existence, the Island Park Senior Center boasts some 300 members. An average of 50 members attend the facility on a daily basis, and they come not just from Island Park, but also Long Beach and Oceanside. Each weekday the program offers members meals and a variety of social activities, from arts and crafts and bingo to line-dancing and tai chi.
The decision to close and merge the senior center with the Oceanside facility was a cost issue to save on rent, according to Scott Stepp, administrator of Institutional Advancement at Catholic Charities, which co-sponsors and funds the program with Nassau County in Island Park, Oceanside, Seaford, Massapequa and Massapequa Park.
The contracts Catholic Charities had to operate these facilities don-t fully cover cost, and they haven-t for years, Stepp told the Herald. The deficit accumulates over time, and it-s gotten pretty significant over the years. ... It-s a stewardship issue, really.
Starting on Jan. 1, Island Park-s members will join their fellow seniors at the facility in the basement cafeteria at St. Anthony-s Church in Oceanside, which also hosts about 50 members a day.
In Island Park we don-t have a supermarket, we don-t have places to shop for clothes, and now they want to take away this center, said Joan, another Island Park member. Why doesn-t Oceanside come here?
Catholic Charities initially wanted to close the underground Oceanside facility and send its members to the street-level Island Park facility. The American Legion hall has two sections, a bar-lounge room with carpeting and cushioned seats and booths, which the Senior Center uses daily, and a larger, newly refurbished banquet hall that the center is permitted to use once or twice a week for some of its exercise and arts programs.
Joe Aniano, who manages the American Legion, said that while he would be happy to allow the senior center to operate for the next 100 years in the smaller room, the legion would be unable to open up its larger hall on a daily basis to accommodate the additional members from Oceanside.
Catholic Charities was looking to use the bigger facility, Aniano said, but that was not our contract. If that doesn-t work for Catholic Charities, OK. But we never contemplated them using the larger room. We can-t afford to have it take a beating every day, five days a week, and then run our affairs there on the weekend. We just can-t work around them.
Aniano stressed that the seniors have to leave not because of the American Legion, but because Catholic Charities is having financial problems and chose to merge.
Despite the merger, Maria Frangella, the director of the Island Park facility since its inception, will retain her job, becoming a manager in Oceanside.
A lot of people helped build the legion, Frangella said. And the legion did a lot for us over the years. But it-s just sad that we have to leave.
Frangella-s secretary, Barbara Magoolaghan, however, will likely be leaving for good as a result of the merger. And the work hours of the program-s bus driver, Joe Marino, will be cut, though the program-s bus service will continue. That will go a long way toward minimizing the impact of the move, which is less than three miles away, Stepp said.
For many of its members, the Island Park facility is centrally located. They live close enough to walk to the legion hall, residents from Long Beach can get on and off a bus at a nearby stop, and when the center closes, some people like to walk a block to the village to get lunch, shop or go to the bank. All the seniors the Herald spoke with last Thursday during a bingo game expressed disappointment that the facility would close. And they had mixed thoughts about whether or not they would give the Oceanside center a try.
I can-t go to Oceanside I don-t have a car, and I-m too old to be taking buses, said Chestler.
Said Grace Errico, I wish the center were staying here, but sometimes you have to change. I-ll at least try it.
Other members are less willing to leave, and vow to take steps to keep the Island Park facility open. I-m going to go to the head commander of the American Legion in the county or even the state about this, said Nick Corso. And I-m going to take it to the mayor of Island Park, too.
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