Though it’s sort of a miracle when an organization decides to buy a 522-acre land parcel with a bunch of buildings and what is correctly described as “some of the most stunning Hudson River views in Ulster County,” it won’t be the first miracle that this storied property off Route 9W in West Park has experienced. Sold for $9.3-million this month by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart to the Bishops of the Coptic Church of New York and New England, the property contributed to a church-certified miracle performed by Mother Frances Cabrini, who when she died in 1919 was buried at West Park as she had wished. She was canonized by the Catholic Church as the first naturalized U.S. citizen-saint in 1946.
Mother Cabrini’s first miracle involved Peter Smith, a baby born in New York City in 1921 whose eyeballs horrifically “dissolved” when a nurse applied a highly concentrated dose of silver nitrate to his eyes. After the accident, Smith’s parents obtained a relic of Mother Cabrini and prayed for her intercession. “The next morning, the baby’s eyes were blue and clear, and he could see,” Julia Attaway, executive director of the St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine in New York, told the Catholic Register newspaper.
Cabrini established a first “orphan asylum” at West Park in 1890, buying the land from the Order of the Jesuits, who sold it cheaply because they didn’t think it had well water. The spring Cabrini’s order discovered still serves to this day.
From her eventual base in Chicago, Cabrini established 67 schools, orphanages, and hospitals – most with shrines. Her orphanages provided a place for orphans and for children of working families who needed temporary care. Attaway said she also made sure teenage girls completed their education and had good-paying jobs, either in service to a family, or as teachers or stenographers, to support themselves in the world.
The Sacred Heart Center for New Americans at Cabrini-on-Hudson in West Park has provided support to immigrant families, assisting school-age children with access to local resources to provide community partnerships, advocacy, empowerment, enculturation, parenting, language proficiency, and life-skill programs. It has served immigrants from Latin America, Caribbean Islanders and other new immigrants in Ulster, Orange and Dutchess counties. Its primary catchment area has been Ulster County.
On the river side of Route 9W are the convent, the administration building and the chapel. On the opposite side were the former orphanage and former facilities of the West Park school district, closed in 2015.
All did not end in days of wine and roses. After a suicide, a rape, and a stone-throwing, incident, the Cabrini facility for young women at West Park was closed in 2011. The brick school built on the estate in 1934 was demolished in 2017.
Paul Adler, Rand Commercial broker for both sides, described the transaction as a match made in heaven.
During the Great Schism of 1054, the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox popes ended up excommunicating each other. In 1965, the leaders of the two faiths removed the mutual excommunications.
The Coptic Church’s specific plans for the West Park property it has just purchased have not yet been disclosed. Broker Adler has written of assurances, however, that the land will be preserved in all its beauty.
Both buyer and seller organizations are exempt from paying property taxes.
Join the family! 
