For seventy years, the community center on Manetto Hill Road in Plainview has answered to one name: the Mid-Island Y JCC. As of last week it answers to a new one. The center is now the Manes JCC, renamed in honor of a gift from Dr. Harvey Manes, his family and the Manes Peace Prize Foundation.

The change is not cosmetic housekeeping. Community institutions on Long Island almost never change their names, and when one does, it usually means someone has secured its future.

The gift behind the name

The center has not put an exact public number on the donation. Nassau County Legislator Arnold Drucker, who joined the celebration at the building, described it in his own account as a ten million dollar gift. Published reports have placed it in the millions as well, with figures varying, and the center's own announcement stayed on gratitude and the new name rather than on a dollar figure.

The new name was unveiled at a gathering outside the Manetto Hill Road building in the same season the center celebrates its seventieth anniversary, a fact its current branding wears proudly.

Drucker put it plainly in his own account of the day: for seven decades the Y has been the center of this community. That is the thing being renamed, and the thing the gift protects.

The surgeon writing the checks

Harvey Manes is an orthopedic surgeon who practiced and taught on Long Island for decades, and in his second act he has become one of Nassau County's most consistent philanthropists. He is a trustee of the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, where a one million dollar gift from his foundation restored a 1920 building on the museum grounds that reopened in 2015 as the Manes Art and Education Center.

In 2007 he founded the Manes Peace Prize Foundation, which awards money to people and organizations working to build peace and goodwill across nations, races and religions. That foundation's name now joins his own on the front of the Plainview center.

Hospitals and universities rename buildings for donors so routinely that the plaques blur together. Community centers almost never get the chance, because gifts of this size almost never point at them. When one does, it says something about the donor as much as the dollar figure: Manes could have put his name on another museum wing, and chose the building where Plainview drops its kids off at camp.

What the name sits on top of

The building at 45 Manetto Hill Road is one of those institutions that quietly touches every stage of a life. It runs an early childhood center and a summer camp, an aquatics program built around its indoor pool, a fitness and wellness center, the Adler Center for people with special needs, an adult center for seniors and a food pantry. The center describes itself as a home for every family, and its membership runs from preschoolers learning to float to retirees who have been walking the same hallways for decades.

It is also, like most JCCs, a broader public square than the initials suggest, serving members across faiths and backgrounds from Plainview, Old Bethpage, Syosset, Woodbury and the surrounding hamlets.

What changes and what does not

Practically, almost nothing moves. The website and email addresses still carry the old miyjcc.org name, the phone number is unchanged and the programs roll on as scheduled. The organization introduced the new name while pointing members to the same website and the same front door.

What changes is the sign, and what the sign means. A generation of Plainview kids learned to swim, shot baskets and aged out of camp under one name, and the next generation will do all of it under another. If the figure attached to the gift is anywhere near what has been described, the trade is a good one: the name over the door is new, and the reason there is a door at all is now a great deal more secure.