Island Profile: Jay Sterling, the man in charge of Union Chapel’s trustees

Jay Sterling, a certified public accountant with a career in finance who heads the Union Chapel Board of Trustees, grew up and attended school in West Hartford, Connecticut, went on to graduate from Denison University in Granville, Ohio in 1971 and received a master’s degree in business from Cornell in 1975. His wife, Susan Evans, whom he married in 1978, connected him to a long-established Shelter Island Heights family, introducing him to this part of the world and to the chapel.

“My grandfather, who I never knew, was an Episcopal minister,” he said recently. “So my mother wanted me to be a minister, which, of course, never happened. But this is the closest I’ve gotten to it and I’ve always been interested in churches and their histories. I have a passion for theology and I’ve always gone to church and been involved.”

He had moved to New York City in 1975 and got “used to walking to everything,” as his wife was. And that’s one of the things about Union Chapel that he really loves. “The chapel is within walking distance for everyone in the Heights,” he said.

Jay and Susan live in the city but are here every weekend from the middle of April to the end of October, when they close their house completely. “This is our summer spot,” he said, “like the chapel, which is open for 13 Sundays, starting in the middle of June until right after Labor Day. It’s strictly, operationally, a summer chapel, meaning the people who attend are either visitors” from off-Island “or people who are only here in the summers and belong to a regular congregation in the place where they live.” Originally, he pointed out, summer chapels were common.

Union Chapel is now non-denominational but was founded by the Methodists in 1872, back when the Prospect Hotel was in the grove on the side of the hill above the North Ferry dock and the chapel was an integral part of the hotel, serving as a meeting place.

The first service in the chapel was observed in 1876. In the past, there were resident ministers who were paid for their services. Now, 13 visiting preachers of different denominations come for the 45-minute service on each of the 13 Sundays. They only preach as members of the Board of Trustees take turns leading the prayers and the rest of the service. All of the 24 trustees are volunteers and Heights residents.

The chapel hosts a number of weddings in May, June, September and October. In full summer, no weddings are allowed. “The chapel is smack in a densely populated neighborhood and the roads are narrow,” Jay pointed out. “There’s not a good place to park. Sort of as a courtesy to the neighbors, we limit the number of weddings, although it’s a good source of income for the chapel and a beautiful spot for a wedding.”

He came to New York City straight from graduate school, he said, because “That’s where the action was.” His first position was at Price Waterhouse, where he worked as a manager for seven years. In 1982, he moved to Dean Witter as a vice president, where he stayed for another five years, going on to several other firms, finally landing in his current slot as the managing director of Caldwell Partners.

“If you’re a CPA,” he said, “you end up becoming the secretary or treasurer of every organization you have anything to do with. They need someone to keep order.” He’s been on the boards of the Heights Property Owners Corporation, the Shelter Island Yacht Club, the schools his children have attended, the Cornell Alumni Association, as well as the board of Planned Parenthood, an organization close to his heart.

“That was one of my mother’s lightning bolts,” he said. “She was founder of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut. She was pretty typical of her time, really, physically conservative, a very strong woman from the suburbs. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, that’s what made up the core of Planned Parenthood all through the United States. It was Margaret Sanger who started it but the earliest pushers were people like my mother. They were very strong women, very happily married, but really people who believed that women themselves were the best determinants of who should be mothers and that’s what my mother firmly believed in.”

He met his wife, a strong woman with a doctorate in psychology, on a blind date. She’s employed as a professor of psychology in clinical psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and mother of the couple’s two children, Olivia, 25 and Christopher, 28. Their children grew up spending their summers here.

“This is kids heaven,” Jay said. “Especially for kids from the city, they can come out here, go around and among their friends, they’re mostly all from Shelter Island and so it’s quite a wonderful community to raise kids.”

He said he found the community special in many ways. He cited the dedication that people here have, mentioning David Larsen, who had headed up the Board of Trustees before Jay took over and his stewardship of the chapel. “He really took care of that place. He knew every nook and cranny of that building. There wasn’t anything that went on in that building that he didn’t know about and so we’ve been very fortunate to have people like him.”

Commenting further on the Island’s volunteerism, “It’s huge. It’s the whole place, from the fire department, everything, it’s not just the chapel. You just have to hope that new people feel the same way because it’s a big effort to make everything click. I think that’s one of the reasons that people are so friendly here — because they need each other to get things done and other people to help them.”