The article in the March 16 edition of the Manhasset Press about the Parish House of Christ Chruch and the proposed Manhasset Arts and Cultural Center was especially welcomed by the members of the MACC board and their supporters in the community. The cover story and the Letter to the Editor by resident architect, Norman Nemec, have drawn attention to MACC and its plans. As indicated by Rev. David Lowry, the Parish House is for sale because the cost of maintaining the building has become a serious liability for the church itself.

The idea for an arts center was born from a long standing dream to give the Children's Orchestra Society (COS), a permanent home. Over time, the dream has begun to take on a life of its own. In 2003, the Engineer Peter Calvacca who had supervised the renovation of Flushing Town Hall produced a structural report that dispelled all doubt about the building's stability and worthiness of restoration. Calvacca also maintained that the Parish House was ideally suited for an arts complex and recognized the building's potential for such a purpose to be greater than that of the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts.

In January 2005, it was the connection to Manhasset resident, David Paterson, playwright and film producer that propelled the plan forward. David had produced the film Love Ludlow in a studio he personally constructed in the Parish House the previous summer and recognized the building's potential as a center for the creative and performing arts.

By early summer, MACC was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in NYS. Only very recently, did the Town of North Hempstead become aware of the availability of the property and the proposal for its transformation into a vibrant cultural center.

The 25,000 square foot Parish House, dedicated in 1932, was originally built to serve as a school. The building is representative of a style of architecture known as "Collegiate Gothic," widely used in the early 20th century to design American educational institutions. Patterned on the "Late Gothic Revival," a style popularized in the United States in the last decades of the 19th century, "Collegiate Gothic" conveyed the imagery of distinguished European universities. The architectural style of the Parish House also complements that of the church building, constructed almost two decades earlier.

In an intensive level survey conducted for the Town of Hempstead in 1987, the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities listed both the Church and Parish House as an "architecturally significant example of an early 20th century Church and Parish House." The architectural integrity of the two buildings, surrounded by the garden-like setting of the historic Rose Hill cemetery, produce a unique cultural landscape at the gateway to the town's civic center, the intersection of Plandome Road and Northern Boulevard It is a landscape that extends eastward on 25A, a designated NYS Heritage Trail, bearing witness to the town's historic legacy.

The investment of resources in the acquisition and restoration of the Parish House, maximizing its potential as an arts center, will not only enhance the efforts of the town's new Office of Business and Tourism, it will also create a fitting legacy for future generations.