Editorial:  No More Saturday Concerts

When Church, State,

and Community Cohabit

Last Saturday night's classical guitar concert by Eliot Fisk at the Good Shepherd Community Center could be the last Saturday night concert you'll ever attend there.

That's because, in a concession to the Catholic Parish - specifically, Fr. Peter Miqueli - RIOC has revised its policy for community use of the Chapel to rule out Saturday events, including such Saturday night concerts, altogether.

It's a wrongheaded approach to the problem of shared uses of Good Shepherd Community Center, a/k/a the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, founded as a Protestant Church in 1889 and in use since the residential founding of Roosevelt Island as both a community center and a place of worship.

RIOC's reason for prohibiting use of the facility for events on Saturday nights - a prime night for cultural events - is that an organization might leave the facility unready for a Sunday morning Catholic Mass. It appears to be a concession to Fr. Miqueli, who has found the community church in occasional mild disarray on Sunday morning.

But RIOC's policy change is an inappropriate way to handle the possibility that somebody might leave a Coke can on the floor or move the altar to clear the background for a performance. It's the wrong solution - one that is likely to deny the community the opportunity to enjoy a number of fine cultural events each year. (Manhattan Park Theater Club and the PS/IS 217 auditorium are acoustically impossible for all but the kind of raucous music that makes its own acoustics.)

The appropriate solution is a mechanism for seeing that the Community Center is left, after any Saturday night event, in good shape for its Sunday morning role as a Chapel. There are several possible ways to implement such a multi-use policy, such as requiring a clean-up deposit so that, if it's required, a RIOC staffer, on duty for the purpose, can put the facility in order between the end of a Saturday night event and the Sunday morning services. Running a community is not a 9-to-5 commitment.

Some of this misbegotten management of the Good Shepherd facility stems from days when RIOC bureaucrats made a habit of giving an automatic "no" whenever a community group wanted to schedule use of the facility. Enterprising residents quickly discovered they could circumvent RIOC by scheduling the facility through Sr. Regina Palamara, who was community-minded and did an admirably diplomatic job of accommodating all comers while making sure both Protestant and Catholic parishes had what they needed.

But she has been gone for a while now, and it's no longer appropriate for the Catholic Parish to be burdened with the scheduling of the facility. It's proper that RIOC should issue a policy and take full charge of the building. But it's not proper that it become unavailable for a key night of prime time on the chance that our community priest will be displeased with how it looks on Sunday morning. RIOC should find a way to make sure that doesn't happen, and manage the facility more sensibly.

DL