Few hoteliers are eager to be the first to test an unproven market. But Sims and Kirsten Harlow Foster consider it a calling card. Their Western Catskills-based company Foster Supply Hospitality has built a quaint empire, opening rustic inns in, as they put it, “unexpected places.” The couple’s newest undertaking will be in their most unexpected location yet: downtown Newburgh, N.Y.
Since 2019, the Fosters have been wading carefully through the financing, permitting, and rubble that came with their acquisition of three distinctive early 1900s buildings on Newburgh’s Grand Street, a block from the riverfront.
Their plan is to convert a former American Legion post and a defunct YMCA complex into an expansive 74-room boutique hotel with a retail component. The four-story Masonic Temple next door will house multiple restaurants plus conference and events space. In what was until recently a hidden corridor lined with lockers for Freemasons’ ceremonial accouterment, Mr. Foster envisions a martini bar looking out over the Hudson. The $45.9 million project broke ground in December and is expected to open as soon as late 2027.
Foster Supply Hospitality is only drawn to projects that “make a positive difference” in the community, said Ms. Foster, who previously worked in microlending programs in developing countries. The company’s James Beard-recognized restaurants and design-forward fly-fishing lodges have seeded new tourism economies for rural communities, including Livingston Manor, the Sullivan County hamlet that five generations of Mr. Foster’s family have called home. The economic boom has become known, as The Times-Union first put it, as the “Foster Supply effect.”
But Newburgh is an ambitious play, and not just because a 28,000-resident urban center presents more complexity than a rural hamlet of 700 people.
The Fosters had heard about its notoriously high crime rate, which was already exceptional in New York as of 1975 and in 2011 outranked neighborhoods like Brownsville and the South Bronx. Although it is still high for the state, the past 15 years have seen a relatively steady decline.
As for tourism, the city hasn’t had a hotel since the 1900s — the last comparable project, the Palatine, opened its doors in 1893; it was razed during an urban renewal effort in 1970.
Still, the Fosters saw potential, imagining weekenders up from New York City, whether on their way to West Point or Dia Beacon, or just looking for an experience in an “undiscovered” destination that offers architectural character, a growing food scene, and “a walkable city experience” on the river, Mr. Foster said. “I was excited — and confused, because the narrative that was out there about Newburgh did not match the version of conversations that I was having with people who had just moved here, or who lived here a long time.”
One of these conversations was with Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, an urban planner and a recent transplant to Newburgh, seeking to “have a bigger impact” in her field than she could in New York City. When she and her husband arrived in 2017, there were 700 vacant commercial and residential properties within four square miles.
“You need density to do improvements in parks and to have locally owned businesses and child care,” Ms. Hersson-Ringskog said. Coffee shops had begun to open up along Liberty Street. A wine store moved in. But among the city’s urban planning needs, she thought: “We needed a hotel. We needed to bring people here.”
Tourism, she added, is “a low barrier” to creating the industry that could spur the economy.
In 2019, as president of the Fullerton, a local community development and civic design organization, she cold-called Mr. Foster. His company’s upstate projects — like the DeBruce, a 12-room, upscale fly fishing lodge with a tasting menu — to her represented the right “sensitivity to place and localism.” She told him she could name a dozen empty or underutilized buildings in downtown Newburgh, rife for adaptive reuse and eligible for historic tax credits, which could make the project more financially viable and help secure financing. Would he be interested?
It was a new idea for the Fosters, but within weeks, they had done a walk-through of the Grand Street homes and buildings and expressed interest in purchasing them from the county.
The historic preservation aspect of the project was particularly appealing. “People react and feel differently” in older spaces, Mr. Foster said, and the couple was inspired by the opportunity for “preserving the details and the intangible elements that create this magic” as they had on their past projects in the Catskills.
The county conducted a request for proposal, or RFP, and received two proposals for the three buildings: one for housing, and one for the Fosters’ hospitality campus.
Foster Supply Hospitality then secured a 12-year Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT — an arrangement with the City of Newburgh to make discounted payments instead of paying the full, new tax rate for the next 12 years. Their 2021 PILOT application estimated the build-out’s total cost at $24.4 million. But with tariffs, inflation and other factors, they were ultimately able to close financing in late November 2025 at the new estimate, 88 percent higher.
The only one of the three buildings being used was the Legion, home to the Boys & Girls Club’s Newburgh Performing Arts Academy. The academy was able to move into a different space on the same block. According to the founder and longtime director, Kim Turner, the change was welcomed, and it plans to expand its Pilates, yoga, and other classes in an effort to engage future hotel guests.
Ms. Turner isn’t alone in thinking ahead about how new foot traffic could be a benefit. Around the corner at Hip-Hop Heaven, a locally owned apparel shop since 1999, Mann Hall, the owner’s brother, was sitting outside selling watermelons he brought up from Georgia. He grew up about five blocks away and used to play basketball at the Grand Street Y.
Repurposing long-vacant landmarks to draw tourism would be “a good thing for the community, period,” Mr. Hall mused. He just hopes visitors make an effort to “blend in with the people” already here, including patronizing the city’s longstanding businesses.
Others are only hoping this project doesn’t let everyone down — again. “We’re just happy to see that the project’s going forward,” said Jacqui Jarmann, who opened her shop Newburgh Mercantile a block from the hotel site 12 years ago. “Newburgh doesn’t need another unfinished group of buildings. We’ve lived through that a few times over.”
The first such heartbreak was in the 1960s and ’70s, when Newburgh used federal Urban Renewal money to raze 50 acres of streets, housing and commercial buildings in its historic waterfront district. But the accompanying promise of new development never materialized: The city was left with an expansive grass lot. It’s still there.
When developers come in with grand promises that don’t work out, longtime locals “relive that trauma,” Ms. Jarmann said. But this feels different.
The Fosters’ attitude — not to mention the progress at the site, where heavy moving equipment buzzes around and dumpsters gradually fill with material as the interiors are rehabbed and reinforced — “is, so far, not looking like anything that we’re used to,” her husband, Eric Jarmann, added. It could be “reputation changing” for the city.
To yet other Newburgh natives, the Fosters’ project has already, even in its nascent state, made a difference.
Mike Pomarico, an architect, grew up in the Newburgh area. After decades of living nearby, he and his wife Karen Ghostlaw, co-founder of international arts magazine The Pictorial List, opened a brick-and-mortar Pictorial Foundation art space in February. The 1,500-foot gallery is a fifth of a mile from the future hotel in an industrial-chic Ann Street garage.
After hearing rumors of the Fosters’ project last year, Mr. Pomarico said he reached out to a city employee. “She told us about the hotel, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s exceptionally good’ — because now, we’re gonna have people coming who are going to want to do things,” he said. This news made them realize that the time to open the foundation’s space was now — and in fact, Ms. Ghostlaw said, they didn’t feel they could afford to wait.
“You get to that critical mass, and there’s enough energy to keep the reaction going — and we’re so close to that right now,” Mr. Pomarico said of Newburgh. “I think we’re really close.”