Orange County to Spend $1.5 Million to Secure Camp La Guardia

Buildings on the former site of Camp La Guardia in the Town of Blooming Grove, N.Y., on April 1, 2016. Yvonne Marcotte/The Epoch Times

The Orange County government plans to spend $1.5 million to secure Camp La Guardia against trespassing and vandalism before it determines the site’s final fate.

The plan, approved at the latest Physical Services and Ways and Means committee meetings, is expected to be passed by the county Legislature on Sept. 7.

Once New York City’s largest homeless shelter, Camp La Guardia was sold to the county for $8.5 million in 2007 and has since been plagued by vandalism and occasional fires.

The county has long attempted to sell the property to developers but with no success; the latest proposal is to turn the 258-acre site into a new county park.

Work to secure the site will begin immediately upon the county Legislature’s approval and will be conducted by in-house staff and existing contractors, according to Travis Ewald, the county Department of Public Works deputy commissioner.

“There are so many outlying structures on the property, so it is very difficult to control [trespass and vandalism],” Mr. Ewald said. “The goal here is to eliminate all buildings that we could possibly eliminate.”

The first step is to clear vegetation and trees to allow access, after which a county contractor will remove hazardous materials such as asbestos from buildings, he said.

Next, in-house staff will demolish five buildings and secure three others by boarding up their windows and doors; for several buildings that are considered dangerous to perform work in, a professional county contractor will handle demolition and disposal.

Lastly, county workers will fence four buildings at the top of the site for potential future use.

The 258-acre Camp La Guardia complex—straddling the Town of Chester, the Village of Chester, and the Town of Blooming Grove in Orange County—began as a women’s prison for New York City in the early 1900s and was known at the time as Greycourt Farm Colony.

During its time as a homeless shelter, residents living nearby had long complained about the negative impacts of the site on their quality of life, such as people at the shelter committing petty crimes and sometimes violent acts in their neighborhoods.

Former Orange County Executive Joseph Rampe took the city to court in the late 1990s, which resulted in an agreement that put restrictions on which people could be housed at the shelter based on their age and criminal history.

In 2007, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg closed the shelter and sold it to Orange County for $8.5 million.

A year later, the county agreed to sell the property for $12 million to developer Mountco, but it would then buy out the contract for $1.2 million in 2016.

Mountco had proposed building more than 800 housing units along with commercial developments on the site, but its plan was met with local opposition and insufficient supporting infrastructure.

Later that year, the county began cutting overgrown grass, cleaning the interiors, and securing the buildings at Camp La Guardia to get the site ready for sale again. But several rounds of solicitation—the latest in 2022—haven’t led to a new contract.

At his State of the County address last year, County Executive Steve Neuhaus proposed that the site be turned into a new county park.

“The ultimate decision on what to do with Camp La Guardia lies with the county Legislature pursuant to county law. I would, though, like to see it as a park and am pleased the Legislature recently appropriated funds to remove some of the buildings on the property,” Mr. Neuhaus told The Epoch Times.