The organ was wheeled on dollies out of Nassau Coliseum on Sept. 1, draped with blue furniture pads and loaded onto a Globe Storage and Moving truck around 11 a.m. The truck was too big to drive on the Grand Central Parkway, so it had to crawl in traffic along the Long Island Expressway. After roughly two-and-a-half hours, the organ finally arrived at its new home at Barclays Center.
It wore some moving scratches when it was uncovered and placed in the main atrium of the main entrance overlooking the ice on the west end of the arena where it will reside during Islanders games this season. But Barclays Center had the organ, which had been at the Coliseum for eight years, refinished.
“It looks brand new,” Paul Cartier said. “She looks good.”
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As the longtime Islanders organist Cartier understands it, he and his instrument were high on the list of traditions Islanders fans wanted carried over to Brooklyn. Cartier doesn’t have a name for the organ but refers to it as “she,” though he doesn’t remember how that started.
He began playing the organ at Islanders games as a fill-in in 1979 when he was 19 years old, taking over the gig full-time in 1981 and performing through 1985. After years of changes to their game presentation, he returned in 2000 as a regular fill-in and after Eddie Layton left a few years later, game ops director Tim Beach gave Cartier the full-time gig.
Cartier’s balanced his Islanders duties while performing at Yankees games Monday through Friday for the last 12 seasons; Ed Alstrom handles weekends in the Bronx and fills in for Cartier when there are conflicts, like there was on Monday when the Isles hosted the Capitals and the Yanks hosted the Red Sox.
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His path to becoming a beloved staple at Islanders games began at age 9, when Cartier’s aunt bought a small Magnus chord organ. “I took to it like fish would take to water,” he said.
He immediately asked his parents to buy a two-keyboard organ. They instead had their son take piano classes for a year to learn fingerings and scales. On the eve of his 11th birthday, Cartier began playing the Saturday 5:30 p.m. mass at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Roosevelt and played there until he was 18; he’s been playing the Saturday 5 p.m. Mass at Our Lady of Hope in Carle Place for the last 27 years and fills in at other churches.
A graduate of Uniondale High School and Hofstra University, Cartier has been an Isles fan since Day 1 and grew up a stone’s throw from the Coliseum in Uniondale. He was 12 when his brother Rudolph H. Cartier Jr. took him to the Islanders’ first game on Oct. 7, 1972, when the Isles’ lost at home, 3-2, to fellow expansion club the Atlanta Flames. He went to Isles games often as his brother signed up for season tickets after the opener, and he’d emulate what the organist was performing. When he was 15, the organist in place “wasn’t too good,” so Cartier lobbied for the job. He was laughed at, but four years later he had his foot in the door.
Cartier has been a member of the South Hempstead Volunteer Fire Department for 37 years and has been commissioner for the last 17 years. He recently retired from his job as an air traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration after 27 years; 56 is the mandatory retirement age.
All the while he’s been cheering on the Islanders, through the highs of the four straight Stanley Cups to the lows like the John Spano debacle. His commute used to be a five-minute drive to the Coliseum. Now it’s a 37-minute train ride to Atlantic Terminal. He enjoys his new office, but the old barn was practically Cartier’s backyard.
“That was difficult to swallow that they were moving,” said Cartier, who teared up several times during the team’s final games in the Coliseum, after the team notched its first 100-point season since 1983-84. At times he got goose bumps watching the hype videos. “I still do seeing the (Bobby) Nystrom goal,” he said, referring to Nystrom’s overtime, Cup-clinching goal in 1980.
Monday was the Islanders’ third home preseason game, and Cartier is still getting used to his new digs. The acoustics are different, but he lauded the new sound system. He wants fans to feel like they’re at the Coliseum as much as possible with respect to traditions, like his performances of the Islanders theme song at the end of the first two periods. Bringing over the Coliseum organ is imperative to that experience.
“If we had another organ, it’d probably still sound like me, but it wouldn’t sound like the Coliseum,” Cartier said. “So as soon as they come in and hear that, I’m gonna say that at least they’ll know they’re at an Islanders game because it sounds the same.”
