Beacon hopes to take ownership of property

Linda Richards knows camp magic firsthand.

For eight years the former schoolteacher and education director for Hudson River Sloop Clearwater has led Beacon's Camp at the Camp at the 51-acre University Settlement property along Route 9D. There, Richards and her team unplug all devices and use song, art and woodland exploration to bring an immersive, exhaustive summer camp experience to children ages five to 12.

This summer, the camp served 180 children, expanding for the first time to three two-week sessions. "They're outside all day long and they love it," Richards said. "Now we've got counselors in training who were there when they were six. That's the magic, that they keep coming back."

After its launch in 2017, a decade after the University Settlement House in New York City closed its sleepaway camp there, Camp at the Camp quickly became the Beacon Recreation Department's signature offering at the property, an expansive, wooded campus at the foot of Mount Beacon. Owned by New York State since 2007, the site is managed by the city through a 20-year, no-cost lease that runs to November 2027.

The lease can be renewed, but Beacon officials earlier this year asked the state to convey University Settlement to the city. Linda Cooper, the director for the Taconic Region of the state parks department, said the state is reviewing the request.

The city has been reluctant to prioritize spending at the site, putting Recreation Department dollars toward the recent $893,000 rehabilitation of South Avenue Park or $400,000 in upgrades planned at Memorial Park next year. State ownership "makes it harder and creates some uncertainty" for the city to invest in the property, Mayor Lee Kyriacou said.

If Beacon were to take ownership of University Settlement, that could change.

Settlement Camp History

According to the Beacon Hebrew Alliance, Eliza Howland, the widow of Civil War hero Gen. Joseph P. Howland, in 1911 donated her family's 250-acre estate to University Settlement House, which had been founded 25 years earlier by the New York Society for Ethical Culture to serve Jewish refugees living in tenement housing on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

The Settlement House eventually sold the land west of what is now Route 9D, including the mansion that would become the Craig House psychiatric center, keeping 51 acres at the base of Mount Beacon.

In 1914, Charles B. Stover, a landscape architect and member of University Settlement who had been New York City's parks commissioner from 1910 to 1913, took over the site to run it as an idyllic countryside camp. Stover designed the landscape and supervised construction of the main building, dormitories and an Olympic-sized, concrete pool that is now Beacon's municipal pool. The structure now used as offices for the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater was housing for summer staff.

By the 1950s, folk singer, activist and future Clearwater founder Pete Seeger built his family's home nearby and became deeply involved with the camp, often leading camp-fire singalongs. Seeger's father-in-law, Takashi Ohta, was at one time the camp's gardener.

University Settlement House ran the summer camp for 90 years before selling the land to New York State, which added it to the Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve, in 2007. Pat Freeman, the property's longtime caretaker, is credited with helping to convince the Settlement House to resist selling the land to developers.

Richards would love to add a weeklong winter camp. Recreation Director Mark Price envisions a walking trail along the perimeter of the woods and a primitive camping site. The municipal swimming pool, which reopened in 2015 after several years of dormancy, needs a new fiberglass lining to replace the current one, which dates to the 1990s and "is well past its useful life," said Price.

While the Recreation Department's operating budget has grown from $304,000 when Price was hired full time in 2014 (he started as a part-t...