February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Others, though less well-known, are lavishly funded by governments, corporations and philanthropists, such as the Japanese-Korean Cultural center on the corner of East 47th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan. The building tells the story of the Japanese and Korean peoples, their ancient cultures and their immigrant experience in America.
The Japanese Center and others around New York City are inspiring for Irish Arts Center executive director Pauline Turley, who, though she is proud of the center’s achievements in the last 31 years, is aware as few others are of the building’s inadequacies.
“If, say, Seamus Heaney came to read,” said Turley, “we’d have to rent a part of Lincoln Center to host the event. There is no way we could contain it at the Irish Arts Center.”
Turley was speaking as she visited several cultural centers around the city last Saturday, reviewing how other ethnicities have sought to preserve their heritage in the world’s cultural capital, and comparing them with Irish efforts.
“It’s incredible,” said Turley, who feels that for all the great work it does, the Irish Arts Center pales beside some of the city’s grandest cultural institutes.
“Almost every ethnicity or country have a cultural presence, a center, in
New York City,” she continued. “But then this is indisputably the cultural capital of the world. And few ethnicities have had as significant an impact here as the Irish.”
Where, Turley asked the Irish and Irish-American communities, are the resources for an Irish center that can stand proud next to La Maison Francaise or Deutsche Haus?
Turley is quick to pay tribute to the facilities that do exist: there is the excellent academia-focused Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. There is the American Irish Historical Society elegantly situated on Fifth Avenue and Central Park. And it’s true that one could hear live Irish music or take in an Irish language class on any night of the week, somewhere in the city.
Then there are the gallant achievements of the Irish Arts Center itself, on West 51st Street and Tenth Avenue. The Irish Arts Center was founded in May 1972 and over the years has helped carry the flag for Irish and Irish-American culture with a series of acclaimed plays, exhibitions, workshops and readings.
The Center also has a more practical side: there are Irish language classes available here too, and through theater workshops, thousands of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut school children have learned of the Irish Famine.
But a Saturday afternoon visiting other cultural centers had Turley asking what the Irish Center could do if it had similar corporate and individual donors as the others. After the Japanese Korean Center, she visited another example on Saturday, this time at Park Avenue and 70th Street, the Asian Center.
A measure of the Asian Center’s clout in New York — besides its ornate glass and red-brick fa