About

An eclectic history...? The Hudson Sports Complex, located on 122 State School Road in the town Warwick, N.Y. has an eclectic history that goes back some eight decades. The site has been used as a vocational training school and reformatory for boys, a correctional facility for adult males and most recently a sports complex with a brewery and office building currently under construction. Hudson Sports Complex is located on 36 acres in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains in southern Orange County, less than 60 miles northwest of New York City. ? ? State Training School The site originally was a vocational training school and reformatory for boys from the 1930s to 1970s on 740 acres, with frontage on Wickham Lake. The State Training School for Boys officially opened on July 1, 1932, although many of the buildings were not completed until two years later. The facility housed as many as 500 boys, although 400 usually were in residence. Most of the boys were between 13 and 15 years old, although some boys as old as 19 lied about their age to avoid prison time. The program included vocational and academic training and work assignments in the kitchen, maintenance and grounds keeping or working on the farm. Mid-Orange Correctional Facility The facilities were converted to an all-male medium security prison in 1976, when it was renamed the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. The first inmates arrived there on June 29, 1977. The facility held as many as 1,000 adult males in 1989, but the typical population number around 750 inmates. It remained in that capacity until June 2011, when New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that the facility would be closed along with six other state prisons. Cuomo wanted to consolidate the correctional facilities based on declining inmate population. ? The Town of Warwick Era Begins? In 2014, the Warwick Valley Local Development Corporation and the Town of Warwick took over the ownership of the property with the goal of redeveloping the area around Wickham Woods into a corporate park with sporting facilities. ? ? The Yard Sports Village In 2015, the Yards Sports Village was established on 36 acres of the property that offered activities in several youth sports, including soccer, baseball, yoga, crossfit, field hockey, general fitness and summer camps. Christian and Raluca Fuchs acquired the property in November of 2018 and rebranded the site as Hudson Sports Complex. Beautiful People In May 2018, Beautiful People, an organization that ensures adaptive sports for children with disabilities, expanded to a town park that is called Wickham Woodlands in the complex. Beautiful People is the Orange County chapter of the Miracle League (285 chapters), a national adaptive sports program. Daniel Fratto Memorial Field was constructed as a handicap-accessible baseball field and rubberized playing surface. The facility includes a pavilion, parking lot, recreational building with handicap-accessible bathrooms and a kitchen. The field is named after Fratto, a 16-year-old fighting severe immune deficiency disorder who volunteered with Beautiful People as a game announcer. He passed away at the age of 19 in 2012. ? Pine Island Brewery In August 2018, the Pine Island Brewing Co. announced plans to open a $2.7 million brewery in a former administration building of the correctional facility on 1.3 acres. Construction was planned for the fall of 2018 and completion in the spring of 2019. Plans called for a rustic, post-industrial design, a 60-foot bar and a brewing area that would create 5,000 barrels of beer per year. ? Hudson Sports Complex In January 2019, the Hudson Sports Complex opened for business. Owned by Christian and Raluca Fuchs, the new facility plans to focus on professional, quality training, bringing in athletes, trainers and coaches from around the world. Fuchs, a former Austrian international and captain, plays for Leicester City, which captured the English Premier Leag