A Death In The Family
For 43 years, the fortunes of the New York Islanders, Nassau Coliseum and Long Island itself have been intertwined. Now, the end is nigh.
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It’s impossible to explain to non-Long Islanders the appeal of Nassau Coliseum, a broken-down, outdated, 43-year-old arena that will unofficially cease to exist (at least in its current state) once the New York Islanders complete their run in this season’s Stanley Cup playoffs and start taking up residence at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
So, consider this universal analogy: The Coliseum is family.
To drive to and take in an event there is like visiting a childhood home. The road is rocky and the familiar sights provide equal parts comfort and dread. The trip serves as confirmation that a move out was necessary, but also offers up wistful memories of the coming-of-age moments that took place inside its walls, and the belief that the next generation will somehow lose something growing up in a different building.
We Long Islanders can badmouth the Coliseum, but we don’t dare let anyone else speak ill of it, and boy, are we going to miss it.
“This place isn’t pretty,” said Dan Savarino, a 21-year-old Hofstra University student and an Islanders analyst on WRHU. “But it’s home.”
Looking at Long Island today makes it difficult to believe the Coliseum ever got built at all, or that the area ever got its own professional sports team, but back in the early 1970s, Nassau Coliseum was the first part of a multi-pronged plan to turn Long Island into a destination for all four major American sports leagues.
Long Island politicians H. Lee Dennison and Francis T. Purcell each spent decades trying to build a domed stadium for a Major League Baseball team in Suffolk County. Purcell told Newsday on Apr. 24, 1972, that he believed Long Island’s “sports-minded population” could attract a team. That October, the owner of a semipro football team that played its games at Hofstra University — located across the street from the Coliseum — said he wanted to bring an NFL team to Long Island.
“There are two million people on Long Island.” Len Feldhun told Newsday in its Oct. 4, 1972, editions. “They want their own teams.
“We know the Giants are going to move to New Jersey and that there are plans for a stadium in Suffolk County. The ultimate goal is a National Football League franchise.”
There would be no NFL or Major League Baseball franchise for the Island, though, and the American Basketball Association’s Nets won the league’s final title in 1975–76 before departing for New Jersey following the 1976–77 season, their first in the NBA. But Long Island would hit the big time with an arena that, within its first year, hosted everything from Led Zeppelin concerts to rallies for President Richard Nixon to international ping pong tournaments, as well as an expansion NHL team that started off in the most ignoble fashion possible in 1972–73 by going 12–60–6.
It didn’t take long, though, for the New York Islanders to experience the type of rapid, unprecedented growth once enjoyed by the area after which they were named. The combined population of Nassau and Suffolk counties — the two Easternmost counties on the physical land mass that is Long Island that make up the area called “Long Island” — more than quadrupled between 1940 and 1970, rising to 2,553,030 as returning veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill to build and move into affordably priced houses.
For those who moved there, the Island became the embodiment of the American Dream. With Manhattan easily accessible by train or highway, it was possible to have it all — to work in the center of the universe by day before retreating to the quiet of the suburbs at night. Still, it remained dwarfed by Manhattan, both in terms of perception and prestige, or lumped in with it as one giant, contiguous being. Upon hearing the words “New York,” many of the early-era New York Islanders figured they were headed for the big city.
“I come in from Ottawa and I’m going to New York — what does that mean?” Denis Potvin said. “The only thing I knew of New York is the Empire State Building. We’re 19 years old, coming in, and this was so different than what we expected.”
Even legendary head coach Al Arbour, who took over before the team’s second season and eventually would lead the Islanders to their four straight Stanley Cups in the early ‘80s, initially had no interest in coaching the Islanders because he didn’t want to go to Manhattan.
“My wife and I were under the impression that Long Island was just like New York City — overcrowded and dirty,” Arbour said in the book Pride and Passion. “We changed our minds after taking a tour of the Island.”
Despite the team’s slow start, residents exercised patience with the franchise, which they recognized as another chance for Long Island to prove its legitimacy. In turn, the Islanders embraced a community that was far cozier than any of them could have imagined.
“To build a wonderful hockey team, you have to have a core of players, you have to have a nucleus, and then you have to have a great supporting cast around them,” said Ed Westfall, the Islanders’ first captain. “What we did, without thinking about it, was (building a) nucleus in the community. We were building a nucleus of players that were getting involved and recognized in the community.”
By the Islanders’ third season, everyone lived on the Island except Potvin — who nonetheless spent his holidays on the Island and enjoyed multiple meals with host families.
“It was impossible to stay home,” Potvin said. “I remember I had Kosher meals around Christmas time. I had the turkey with a Christian family. I went to an Italian family and Christmas was all fish. I never knew any of these things before.”
The Islanders made the playoffs in just their third season. Appropriately enough, their first postseason foes were the big-city Rangers, whose fans filled the Coliseum during the arena’s first season and cheered as the Rangers outscored the Islanders, 12–2, in three games on the Island.
“The first game that the Islanders ever played here against the Rangers, they came out on the ice first and they got a standing ovation,” original Islanders general manager Bill Torrey said. “We came out on the ice and there was dead silence.”
The embarrassment of being ignored and taunted in their own building fueled the Islanders, who understood what their residential neighbors had been going through for decades.
“When the Rangers scored, the place was on fire,” Clark Gillies said. “I was like ‘Damn.’ And somebody said ‘Well, get used to it. That’s what happens when we play the Rangers here at the Coliseum.’ I said ‘Well, that’s not something I want to get used to. We’ve got to do something to change it.’”
The Islanders changed it by stunning the Rangers in that three-game series, winning it two games to one when the late J.P. Parise scored 11 seconds into overtime of Game 3 at Madison Square Garden.
The Islanders were here to stay, in more ways than one.
“We used to watch people walk into the building and say ‘There’s Rob and Lyla, there’s Eddie and Susan,’” Bobby Nystrom said. “We just had that kind of a relationship. The best thing of all was that we didn’t have that mystique about us, where we were kind of secluded. We were out in the public and we loved eating in restaurants and interacting with the folks here.
“And that’s why I think it was a little bit special, Because the guys weren’t aloof and they weren’t distant. They were out there, mingling.”
Westfall said he and teammates used to stop at the Fort Salonga Inn, a bar near the team’s first practice facility in Smithtown, for beers after practice. The owner initially threw the players out because their sweaty practice attire didn’t fit the bar’s dress code, but he quickly became close friends with the Islanders.
“He was the only person ever allowed to travel on all of our charters, because of what he did for the whole team — Al Arbour and Bill Torrey included,” Westfall said. “When we had the gas shortages, he had somebody there (at the bar). You pull up, go get a couple beers at this place and the car disappeared and got a full tank of gas. So they made him an honorary member of this team.”
Gillies and his teammates spent most of their summers playing charity softball games on the Island.
“We would probably play, over the course of two months while we were kind of off, 30 or 40 softball games — to the point where my wife said to me one time ‘I can’t wait until the season starts again so I’ll see you,’” Gillies said.
“I know we had a lot of fun. It was pretty decent exercise. It was a lot like hockey: You play a softball game, then you have beer.”
The 1975 playoff appearance was the first of 14 straight for the Islanders. They lost in the NHL semifinals four times in five years before finally winning it all in 1980, when Nystrom scored 7:11 into overtime of Game 6 against the Philadelphia Flyers at the Coliseum.
Afterward, goalie Billy Smith spoke for both the Islanders and islanders alike when he was told the Cup was coming to New York for the first time since the Rangers won it in 1940.
“The Stanley Cup is not in New York,” Smith said. “It’s on Long Island.”
The ticker tape parades the Islanders enjoyed in each of the next four springs did not take place in the Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes, but along all the strip malls and Mom and Pop businesses of Hempstead Turnpike.
“The parades came right past our restaurant for four years straight,” said Frank Borrelli, whose restaurant, Borrelli’s, caters the visiting team’s meals at the Coliseum.
“I think that is something that I really liked more than anything else about being on the Island,” Nystrom said. “We had a parade down Hempstead Turnpike. That’s what we wanted. Most of us came from small towns and so we really identified with the community.”
The growth experienced by both Long Island and the Islanders was impossible to sustain. By the late 1980s, both the area and the team were in the midst of steep, difficult-to-reverse declines.
The Island’s population increased by only 56,182 from 1970 through 1990. The dwindling amount of land on which to build houses caused a corresponding rise in real estate prices to go with the already-high cost of living that made Nassau and Suffolk counties an increasingly tough place to raise a family.
“It got so expensive, it was prohibitive for people (to) live here,” Westfall said. “People can’t even retire here.”
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Long Island became known as the butt of jokes: Teased hair, thick accents, terrible traffic and tabloid-friendly buffoons. Strip malls began dominating the landscape deep into rural Suffolk, which lent an annoying sameness to what was once an Island strength. The area’s economy suffered an irrecoverable blow when Grumman, which built airplanes for the military, closed its Long Island operations following the end of the Cold War. Long Island, a popular setting for 1980s sitcoms such as “Growing Pains” and “The Wonder Years,” became portrayed in the 1990s, not without merit, in “Everybody Loves Raymond” as a place adults could only afford to live in if their elderly parents/in-laws lived next door.
The Islanders, meanwhile, thought the next generation of Cup-winning talent arrived when Pat LaFontaine and Patrick Flatley joined the team in time for the run to the 1984 Finals. But the Islanders have won just four playoff series since 1985, and none since making the conference finals in 1993.
The franchise fell into constant, almost comical disrepair. Instead of being known for hockey excellence, the Islanders became more synonymous with fashion faux pas. They wore several different uniforms, including the infamous “Fish Sticks” jerseys, from the mid-90s through 2010, when the Islanders finally returned to wearing the dynasty-era uniforms (with the occasional third sweater, of course).
Owner John Pickett, who oversaw the four Cup winners, grew disinterested and detached upon moving to Florida. A quartet of local businessmen bought the team in 1992 (and foisted the Fish Sticks upon the world) but sold it in 1996 to Texan “entrepreneur” John Spano, who agreed to buy the Islanders for $165 million before it was revealed he was not only completely broke but wanted on multiple counts of fraud and forgery.
Pickett regained control of the team before selling it again to Howard Milstein and Steven Gluckstern in 1998. The duo immediately declared plans to bring a fifth Cup to the Island as well as a new building to replace the Coliseum, which was decaying as fast as its main tenant.
But the byzantine politics of Nassau County, which initially left the Coliseum in limbo for a decade before it was finally built, were way too strong a foe for Milstein and Gluckstern. After failing to convince SMG — which manages the Coliseum — to accept $7 million to allow the Islanders to escape the final 17 years of their arena lease, Milstein and Gluckstern found a hoist in the ceiling that led them to declare the Islanders were “structurally evicted.”
During the 1998–99 season, the Islanders traveled commercial and stayed at Holiday Inns. Afterward, ownership asked general manager Mike Milbury if he could reduce payroll to $5 million.
“It was bad, it was a difficult time,” said Trevor Linden, who was the Islanders captain for 15 months in 1998 and 1999. “When I (was acquired) and came here was the day the Milstein family bought the team. And that didn’t really work out. It was more of a real estate play, if my memory serves me correctly. So it was a bit of a challenging time.”
If the Island was a place you couldn’t afford to live, the Islanders became the team for whom you didn’t want to play. Kirk Muller, who was acquired from the Montreal Canadiens in 1995 in a deal that sent away the popular Pierre Turgeon, played just 27 games over two seasons before forcing a trade to the Toronto Maple Leafs. He was just the first of many to express a reluctance to play for the Islanders. Both current defenseman Lubomir Visnovsky and former goalie Evgeni Nabokov joined the Islanders after initially refusing to report to the team following their respective acquisitions, and last summer, at least three players — former Islander Thomas Vanek, as well as Dan Boyle and Jarome Iginla — took less money to sign elsewhere.
Driving to and entering the Coliseum offers up a pretty good summation of what has become the Long Island experience. The highways are choked with traffic and littered with potholes that can’t or won’t be fixed. Newsday reported earlier this month that the 2013 maintenance budget for a 4.6-mile stretch of the Long Island Expressway at the Nassau/Queens border was about $11,000.
Disrepair is a state with which the Coliseum is familiar. According to Fish Sticks, a book authored by former Islanders beat writers Peter Botte and Alan Hahn, the Coliseum’s average maintenance budget dropped from about $50,000 a year from 1989 through 1996 to $22,000 a year at the end of the ‘90s.
Judging by the looks of the building’s infrastructure during this, its final season, that budget hasn’t been raised a whole lot. The media entrance is covered by an awning that includes a window that’s been broken for weeks. There is one concourse on which all 16,170 fans must enter and exit, which causes tieups that make the trip to the Coliseum seem swift. The metal bases of thousands of seats are rusted, as are the bottoms of the actual seats themselves. The felt upholstery of the seats is faded.
A game against the Los Angeles Kings on March 26 was delayed so that a pane of glass behind the Kings’ net could be replaced. Earlier in the evening, advertising signage fell off the boards a few feet to the right of the visiting bench. A referee went to pick up the signage but was accidentally checked into the bench as he rolled it up.
And yet, there is reassurance in the familiarity of it all, and the lack of pretense involved in the entire process. Frustrations fade a bit with each landmark along stoplight-choked Hempstead Turnpike and each exit passed during the hiccupping stop-and-go crawl along the Southern State or Meadowbrook parkways. An old song on the radio provides a reminder of a concert seen at the Coliseum.
Inside the Coliseum, the soundtrack prior to games and during stoppages includes deep album tracks from deliciously dated hard rock acts such as Aerosmith, Deep Purple and Motley Crue. The soap in the press box and luxury suites comes out of the refillable/disposable soap pumps found on shelves in every supermarket. A seat in the last row of section 329 offers just as good a view as a seat by the ice.
“I think it’s one of the most personable arenas,” Islanders right winger Cal Clutterbuck said. “I think people are just genuine fans. They’re not there to take somebody out to the game to try to impress them. They’re there as a community cheering on a team. It’s a good atmosphere.”
Chris King, the 54-year-old, longtime radio voice of the Islanders, said he’s been to more than 1,200 hockey games at the Coliseum since it opened in 1972. In recent years, he’s introduced the building to his children, who have taken in the circus and the Harlem Globetrotters games as well as Islanders games and morning skates with Dad.
“It’s hockey, for one thing, but it’s more than that,” King said. “It’s one family passing the torch on to the next generation when you bring your children here for the first time. It’s a second home, is what it is.”
The Islanders of the last three decades haven’t enjoyed the spectacular success experienced by those of the dynasty era. And it’s not easy for out-of-staters to arrive on the Island and carve out a living as peaceful and bucolic as the ones cultivated by the post-World War II generation. But the Islanders’ resurgence this season is a reminder that for those that have chosen to give it a shot, Long Island can still be a place to establish oneself, to feel at home in a surprisingly modest and blue-collar populace that is comfortable in the shadow of one of the world’s premier cities.
Islanders head coach Jack Capuano, who has been at the helm longer than anyone since Arbour, said his friends on the Island have gotten to know a far different person than the intense one the rest of the world sees during his press conferences.
“I love to smoke a cigar and I’ll have cigars with them,” Capuano said. “Just walking around the neighborhood, we’ll talk hockey for a little bit and then we can talk about other things in life — family and kids and everything else that’s going on in the world today.
“I love to interact, I love to talk, and this is a great spot because no one’s lost for words around here.”
Capuano was greeted with a standing ovation in one of the chain restaurants near the Coliseum following the Islanders’ Game 4 playoff win over the Pittsburgh Penguins in May 2013.
“I was just going out with my wife to get a little bite to eat,” Capuano said. “Went into a place and the people were yelling. Other people would walk in and get that embarrassed feeling, but for me, I’d clap right back or walk around the room and give high-fives.”
Led by Capuano, the final Islanders team to occupy Nassau Coliseum has embraced the franchise’s past while also connecting with current fans. Prior to the final home opener against Carolina on Oct. 11, the arena went dark as superstar John Tavares — a quiet person for whom the Island was a perfect spot to grow into the role of captain — led the teams on to the ice, where the players gathered in a circle and raised their sticks to fans who had lit the Coliseum with the glow of their cell phones.
During the season, more than a dozen Islanders legends participated in ceremonial puck droppings at the Coliseum. Each one walked off the ice shaking hands with every Islanders player. When Westfall dropped the puck a few weeks ago, the first player to greet him was Tavares.
On Jan. 9, Tavares celebrated an overtime goal against the New Jersey Devils in Newark by raising his arms and chanting “YES! YES! YES!” — the very chant Islanders fans picked up from WWE star Daniel Bryan at the start of the season. Ever since, the Islanders punctuate every home win by gathering near center ice and leading the arena in the chant.
“If there’s one thing I’ve picked up on, it’s guys are proud to be Islanders and guys are proud to be around here,” Clutterbuck said. “And I think people here are genuinely proud of this team. When you start winning games and the people who have stuck with you through some seriously bad times get to enjoy winning, we enjoy it, too.”
Clutterbuck and his teammates have also come to enjoy life on the Island and to learn, like their predecessors, that it’s an easy place in which to fit in.
One of the more memorable social media moments of the NHL season occurred Feb. 11, when popular Islanders left winger Matt Martin — who was shopping at the nearby Roosevelt Field Mall — took a selfie behind a fan who was wearing his jersey yet was unaware that Martin was right behind him on an escalator.
“Where we’re at, we see quite a few people in our building and interact with them,” said center Brock Nelson, who lives in a Garden City apartment complex with Tavares and other teammates fairly close to the Coliseum. “I don’t think they put us above anyone else. It’s fun just being able to have that interaction, not only as fans but as normal people.”
This season, the Islanders sold out 27 of their 41 regular season games. Fans, wearing uniforms from all eras of the franchise’s history, tailgated in the fall and once the weather began warming up in spring. Memories of concerts past were evoked by the images and sounds of men hawking knockoff T-shirts commemorating the building’s final season.
“Once they go to Brooklyn, there’s not going to be any more of this,” longtime season ticket holder Pat DeCanio of Lindenhurst said as he gazed around the parking lot prior to a March 29 game against the Detroit Red Wings. “I’m going to miss the whole atmosphere. I’m going to miss everything about coming here.”
Inside the arena, the Coliseum’s thousands of full- and part-time workers — none of whom are guaranteed to be retained by Barclays Center management once control of the building is handed over — soaked in each game and interaction with fans as well as the staff and players from both the Islanders and opponents.
“The staff comes in and ask how was (our) summer, nice to see you again,” said Paul, a security guard stationed outside the visitor’s locker room. “Even professional hockey players, even security from different concerts. They remember seeing you. They remember faces. It is kind of nice.”
The melding of the past, present and future sped up as the number of games left at the Coliseum dwindled. During a four-day span in late March, the Coliseum hosted three Islanders games, a Barry Manilow concert, a rec league hockey game played after an Islanders game, and a home show that took place at the same time as an Islanders game. Such variety and kitsch is hard to envision at Barclays. When the Islanders clinched a playoff spot, the Barclays Center Tweeted its congratulations — but with the message set against the familiar black Barclays background and the “Y” in “Yes! Yes! Yes!” shaped like the Y on the third jersey that offers no map of the Island.
The Islanders may only have one game left at the Coliseum, win or lose in Saturday’s Game 6 against Washington. Once the Islanders playoff run ends, there will be a handful of concerts and small trade shows before the building closes for renovations after one final Billy Joel concert on Aug. 4. After that, what awaits Nassau and Suffolk counties? What will be the anchor and attraction be for the most expensive place to live in the country, per a recent study by FindTheBest.com?
The Coliseum is scheduled to be renovated by Bruce Ratner, who owns a majority share of Barclays and has said the Islanders will play at least six games a year at a renewed Coliseum. That, and the fact that Barclays wasn’t built for hockey (along with the persistant-but-unsubstantiated rumor that the Islanders have an out clause in their Barclay’s lease after five years), means hope is building among alumni and fans alike that the Islanders — nicely positioned to contend for the Cup over the next few years — will eventually return to the Coliseum full-time and perhaps help the area author a rebound.
Others, though, are less optimistic.
“Everyone’s sort of saying ‘Geez, is the team moving, are they going to come back?’” Islanders legend Mike Bossy said. “No. They’re not coming back. The team’s gone to Barclays. You never say never, but I mean, in October, the team will be playing at the Barclays Center. It’s sad they couldn’t get anything done.”
“It’s about an identity — it’s an identity of Long Island,” Westfall said. “It’s a big league. And now it’s gone closer to the city. Nothing against the Brooklyn people, but its not Long Island like we know it.”
Soon, that area, and the building that so embodied it, will be in the rear view mirror. A new, modern Coliseum will be built, and maybe the Islanders will someday occupy the building, but whatever it is, won’t be the same. And neither will the Island, nor the Islanders.
“The people made us feel like such a part of Long Island,” said Bryan Trottier, who played the first 15 seasons of his storied career with the Islanders. “We were from all over — different parts of Canada and the United States, a few guys from Sweden. Maybe they felt a little bit like we had a little something getting Long Island on the map or built their identity up.
“We felt we were probably a bigger reflection of Long Island, which is, I think, just one of acceptance (and) wonderful loyalty.”
