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Cannabis Industry Anchors Campus But Brewery, Sports Club & Other Businesses Make For An Eclectic Matrix of Commerce
By Tina Traster
In 2011, the Town of Warwick in Orange County might have viewed New York’s shuttering of the sprawling 730-acre Mid-Orange Correctional Facility prison campus as a disaster that would leave a blighted hole in the town, not to mention the loss of jobs. Instead, town leaders, along with Orange County and New York State seized on an opportunity to create the Warwick Office and Technology Park.
Now you might be thinking, okay, ratables are all good but why be so excited about a soulless, drab corporate campus?
Because this park is anything but run of the mill. Instead, the site is a superb template of adaptive reuse. An historic farmhouse, barns, and a batch of achingly beautiful 1930s brick buildings that first housed a boys’ reform school and later prisoners, have become a campus for cannabis production, along with a smattering of other businesses. Commerce occupies 150 acres on the campus, while 600 acres have been captured for recreational space, including the return of a once inaccessible lake to the public.
Celebrating its ten-year milestone, the Warwick Office and Technology Park is the story of vision, swift action, persistence, and the partnering of the town, the Orange County IDA, New York State and private business.
Leadership in the Towns of Haverstraw and Stony Point, as well as Rockland County, would do well to study the evolution of the vacated prison campus into a thriving vibrant hub that has created more than 300 jobs, made a home for the burgeoning cannabis industry, and is attracting folks from near and far to its brewery, whiskey bar, and reclaimed open space.
Warwick’s holistic vision to repurpose a significant piece of land stands in stark contrast to Letchworth Village, the former psychiatric center, which spans nearly 200 acres in Haverstraw and Stony Point and includes nearly 40 abandoned stone buildings. The campus, which spreads on both sides of Willow Grove Road, has sat underutilized and crumbling for two decades after the respective towns bought the site from New York State. In Stony Point, multiple proposed housing and hospitality projects have failed under referendums. In Haverstraw, the Town Board recently amended its Urban Renewal Plan to clear the way to facilitate a $12 million sale of nearly 23 acres in the southeast corner of the property to BNE Acquisitions, LLC of Livingston, NJ. The developer plans to build 300 units of market-rate housing but the plan does not have a commercial or retail component and none of the historic structures will be repurposed.
“It was pretty devastating when we learned on the Friday of a July 4th weekend that the prison was closing,” said Michael Sweeton, then the town Supervisor, who also served as vice president of the Warwick Valley Local Development Corporation (WVLDC), which was founded in 2011 to acquire and redevelop the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility that former Governor Andrew Cuomo shuttered for belt-tightening, along with six other prison facilities.
In 2014, the State of New York approved the transfer of the property to the WVLDC and the Town of Warwick. The entity secured private financing to pay New York State $3.7 million for approximately 150 acres of the 730-acre site. The rest was transferred for $1 and set aside for town recreation and deed-restricted open space.
With grants from Orange County Industrial Development Agency (OCIDA), the New York Office of Empire Development and private money, WVLDC sold the properties to what is now known as the Warwick Office and Technology Park. The redevelopment project is a joint effort between the town, the WVLDC, Orange County IDA, private business and the New York State Empire Development.
The Orange County IDA helped drive development of the campus with an initial investment of $1 million in 2014. WVLCD used the funding to prepare 10 shovel-ready pad sites, covering 50 acres each, and infrastructure including water, sewer, natural gas and fiber-optic service. A new road and cul-de-sac provided access to the pad sites.
The WVLDC sought zoning changes to subdivide the land and to be “shovel ready” to attract businesses.
Roughly 600 acres were reclaimed as recreational space including Lake Wickham, which had never been accessible to the public. Along the way Wickham Woodlands, with an arboretum of hundreds of native trees, planted meadows, pathways, and a sculpture garden, has made the property a signature attraction for the town and region.
What makes the Warwick Office and Technology Park a winning formula is that the campus was transformed with a grand plan that included preserving historic buildings, targeted marketing, selling vacant plots, and tying the campus together with roads and infrastructure and green space. At the heart of its efforts, the town envisioned a cannabis hub on its agricultural campus, which turned out to be a good strategic hunch, but it has not been limited to that purpose alone.
“We were able to attract business because of the funding; it made us competitive in marketing the site,” said Sweeton.
The transformation from a prison complex to a thriving business hub and sports park has created jobs and generated tax revenue. In 2024, businesses paid $408,098 in property taxes and employed more than 300 workers.
Last July, the WVLDC sold its last parcel, and presented the town with a $1.5 million check for improvements for recreation facilities.
Phyto-Farma labs, Citiva Medical, and urbanXtracts were early pioneers on the site. The irony of the transformation is not lost on anyone: a campus that once housed prisoners, many on marijuana offenses, is now making a product that New York State has sanctioned and is promoting as a growth industry.
“The prison had been there since the 1970s,” said Sweeton. The prison housed about 500 inmates and employed some 300 people. “They were a neighbor, an employer.” At the time, Sweeton and other officials agreed the property was “too important to leave in the hands of the state.” He added, “We wanted to take control of our destiny. We came up with a plan, and while the state was skeptical, to their credit they said ‘okay.’”
Phyto-Farma Labs tests cannabis for potency and other characteristics. Citiva Medical purchased 8.5 acres for a nearly 40,000 square-foot medical cannabis cultivation and processing center.
In 2021, the Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries cut the ribbon on the eight-parcel, 40-acre site it bought and redeveloped into a 450,000-square-foot facility to grow and process cannabis. The Orange County IDA gave Green Thumb a 15-year tax abatement and other benefits.
urbanXtracts revitalized the former 1930s barn on the site into an 18,000 square-foot state-of-the-art manufacturing center for cultivating and processing cannabis and its extracts from seed to sale. The company offers “white-label” service, processing and packaging products for other companies. It expanded its footprint with a four-thousand square foot greenhouse and outdoor cultivation area, as well as additional education and training facilities.
“It’s the organic-ness of the campus that makes it thrive,” said urbanXtracts CEO Eran Sherin. The company also owns two prominent former prison brick buildings, that are in relatively good condition but still unoccupied and surrounded by fencing.
“We have cleaned them out so we can understand what we have there,” Sherin said. Just like we did with the barn, we will repurpose them. We will find the beauty in what is there. Bring them back to life with purpose and service. This is a campus that is still developing; still very much emerging.”
Also in the park is Drowned Lands Brewery, a tap room offering ale, pizza, and a vibrant welcoming mat with its family-friendly space and outdoor patio. The craft beer maker is focused on “terroir,” meaning the ingredients derive from the surrounding environment, including the county’s renown rich “black dirt” soil. The business is housed in the 1930s former administration building of the former reform school for boys founded in the 1930s by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Companies in the business park include Hudson Sports Complex (the Foxes), which has fields, courts and batting cages for training. The roster rounds out with the Last Whiskey Bar, DeGraw & Dehaan Architects, Eden Restoration, Ground Control, and Scripted Fragrance.
At the entrance of the complex is a magnificent white “Manor House,” that stands in contrast to the hulking brick buildings. It houses Scripted Fragrance, a candle-maker. In 2018, the Orange County IDA made a $2.5 million investment to start a business accelerator in the building, the original farmhouse on the site. The 10,000 square-foot building, built in 1842 by Harry B. Wisner, was completely renovated. The farmland that would eventually become the correctional facility was bought by Captain John Wisner Sr. in 1766.
The Manor House is where Amberlee Isabella, and her co-partner and mother Elizabeth have been building Scripted Fragrance since 2021. Around that time, the cottage-industry candle maker, working from Isabella’s basement, was featured on a CBS Sunday Morning segment about Etsy. Fulfilling orders took a month. Isabella jumped on an ad she saw for a small business accelerator program at The Manor.
“Our business has evolved tremendously since moving here in 2021, most notably in our manufacturing and custom capabilities,” said Isabella, whose business occupies the entire building. “Because we are vertically integrated, we can deliver incredibly high-quality custom candles.” Customers include the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC, celebrities like Hoda Kotb, and organizations such as the PGA, she said.
This year, Scripted Fragrance opened its candle store in the Manor House, where it offers candle-making classes.
Asked what he would tell Rockland officials casting for solutions for blighted campuses, Sweeton said, “There is no better way to help a community than to take control and develop it with a vision that fits. To leave it to chance, is risky. It takes determination and forethought and the energy to plow ahead.”
After Warwick seized the day, the town held town board meetings and met with citizens. He said buy-in, particularly over creating a cannabis hub, helped to give the project momentum.
“We asked people if they thought it was a good thing, and there was 100 percent agreement.”
