Safe Harbors Green marks 10 years with volunteer stewardship, new art commission

Safe Harbors of the Hudson marked the 10th anniversary of Safe Harbors Green by turning the half-acre park at Broadway and Liberty Street into a new round of downtown stewardship, pairing a volunteer program with a public art commission. The anniversary matters because the site was once a vacant lot, purchased in 2015 and opened to the public in 2016, and Safe Harbors has spent the past decade trying to prove that a small patch of land can help anchor larger change in Newburgh.

Executive Director Lisa Silverstone said the anniversary year would move the park’s activation “into overdrive.” The new Safe Harbors Green Thumbs program will run through the growing season, giving volunteers training and tools before they work under professional guidance in designated areas of the park. The tasks are practical ones, pruning, weeding, trimming and transplanting, but the larger goal is harder to measure: building community ownership so the park is cared for as a shared civic space rather than a finished project.

That approach fits the park’s design, which came from artist and applied ecologist Bryan Quinn of One Nature. Safe Harbors Green includes solar lighting, rainwater gardens, bioswales and more than 50 native plant species. The bioswales and rainwater gardens are meant to keep runoff from the park and the adjacent building out of the Newburgh sewer system, while the native plantings support pollinators. Safe Harbors describes the space as fully ADA-accessible, with lawns, benches and solar-lighted pathways.

The organization says the Green has become a permanent stage for downtown Newburgh activity, with a weekly farmers’ market and a steady calendar of performances, festivals and community events. That is where the anniversary lands as more than a celebration. It is a test of whether the park has produced lasting change in foot traffic, street life and investment around those blocks, or whether its main value has been symbolic. Safe Harbors is betting the answer is both, and that the next phase depends on keeping the space active.

The new art commission is meant to do the same. Orange County sculptor Nicole Hixon will create The Divine Feminine: Ancestral Roots, a site-responsive work using woven willow canes around an existing sassafras tree. As the seasons change, the piece is expected to grow into a canopy with a crown-like effect, adding another layer to a site designed to evolve rather than sit still.

Safe Harbors Green sits within a broader downtown strategy that began in 2000 with the founding of Safe Harbors of the Hudson and expanded in 2002 with the purchase of the former Hotel Newburgh. The Cornerstone Residence now includes 128 single-room-occupancy apartments, including 12 artist lofts, housing formerly homeless residents, veterans, low- and very low-income working adults, people with mental health diagnoses and physical disabilities, and artists. In that context, the park is not an isolated amenity. It is part of a longer bet that Newburgh’s revival will come block by block, through housing, arts and consistent public use.