Delano-Hitch Park

Assessment · Evaluación

The 27-acre Delano-Hitch Recreation Park was donated to the City of Newburgh by Annie Delano Hitch, aunt of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1916. The land was originally given to be a “driving park,” and the stadium that rose on it opened in 1926 to become one of the anchors of Newburgh’s sporting and civic life. Annie Delano Hitch inherited the property following her husband’s death in 1911, and the same year the Algonac estate burned, she made the gift to the city that would carry her family’s name for more than a century. The Delano family’s connection to the Hudson Valley ran parallel to the Roosevelts across the river at Hyde Park, and the park is a tangible remnant of that gilded-age relationship between private wealth and public generosity.

Over the decades, the stadium hosted four professional baseball teams, including the Newburgh Hummingbirds in 1946, the Nighthawks, the Black Diamonds, and the Newts, as well as Pop Warner football, semi-pro leagues, American Legion ball, high school and college play. Today the park encompasses a baseball stadium, skate park, outdoor fitness area, little league diamond, bocce courts, basketball courts, an Aquatic Center, playgrounds, horseshoe pitches, a soccer and football field, the Fast Pitch Softball Hall of Fame, and a multipurpose Activity Center, making it the largest public recreation complex in the city. It is on this same site that the Newburgh Plays project proposes to build the first inclusive destination playground in the city’s history.

The 2022 Scenic Hudson Inventory placed Delano-Hitch in its highest-priority Re-Envision tier. The reason is straightforward: the city’s largest park lost both of its small playgrounds last year, when they were torn down for safety reasons, and has not had any play infrastructure since. The Aquatic Center, which opened in May 2025 with $8M of NY SWIMS funding and $7M of City ARPA, partially answered the recreation gap, but it is closed nine months a year and serves swimmers, not toddlers.

The Phase 1 plan is a 1.2-acre inclusive playground in the northeast quadrant, across the path from the Aquatic Center, one minute from the Washington and Lake bus stop. Seven coordinated zones, designed to read as one continuous landscape, with berms and plantings carrying the transitions instead of fences. Estimated to open by 2028.