On a Sunday morning in Verplanck, the parking lot off Riverview Avenue fills up before nine. Someone is setting a folding table with jars of local honey. A coach is walking a shell down to the water at Lake Meahagh while a line of kids in life vests waits its turn. A retiree leans against the fishing pier rail with a bucket for crabs. None of it looks planned, exactly. It looks like it has always been there.
It hasn't. Every piece of what happens at Cortlandt Waterfront Park on a given Sunday exists because one specific person got fixated on a problem the town wasn't solving and refused to let it go. That's not a slogan. It's the actual sequence of events, three separate times, over three decades. If you already live here, you've probably used all three of these things without knowing any of that. Here's what's underneath the routine.
The market that moved because it outgrew its lot
The Sunday market most people know as Market on the River didn't start at the river. It started at Mt. Carmel Field, a smaller lot a few blocks inland, run under the name Let It Shine, a nonprofit built around the idea of giving local growers and makers a place to sell. In 2021 the market moved to Cortlandt Waterfront Park and took its current name, trading a neighborhood field for almost thirty acres of Hudson frontage.
The 2026 season opened May 8 and runs on Sundays through October, with food and craft vendors, live music, and yoga that in recent seasons has been staged under an outdoor structure the park added specifically for that purpose. Parking and admission stay free, which matters less as a fact and more as a signal: this isn't a ticketed event trying to become a destination. It's a weekly fixture built by a nonprofit that decided Verplanck needed one and then kept showing up until it became one.
The lake that used to supply ice to New York City
Lake Meahagh is where the market crowd tends to drift after they've bought their honey, because that's where the rowing happens. What most people watching from the shore don't know is that the lake used to supply ice to New York City, and that in the years before the club showed up, it had become a dump.
A town councilman named Frank Farrell noticed a youth regatta in Poughkeepsie and had a hunch that a place like Cortlandt, full of people who'd rowed in high school or college, could support the same thing. He didn't row himself. He was, by his own account, more comfortable staying off the water than getting on it. But he pushed the remediation of the lake forward anyway, and a little over a decade ago the Cortlandt Community Rowing Association put its first boats in.
Today the club counts roughly ninety members ranging from age eleven into their eighties. Boats are stored in a pair of former seaplane hangars near the boat launch at Cortlandt Waterfront Park, and the club rows both on Lake Meahagh and out onto the Hudson itself. One of the coaches summed up the appeal simply: rowing takes almost no prior athletic background to start, just a willingness to show up and pull. Farrell himself put it a different way after getting pressed into a boat at a Philadelphia regatta when a rower didn't show: "the sport is easy to learn but hard to master."
The club's 2026 summer programs, both youth and adult, filled their registration windows over the early summer, with the last deadlines landing in early July. What continues year-round is the indoor side: ergometers, weights, and Row2Music classes out of a second-floor space on 6th Street, plus a Survivor Rowing program built specifically for people recovering from cancer. The lake itself sits behind a community garden most Sunday visitors never notice, a detail that only makes sense once you know someone had to clear washing machines out of the water to get it usable in the first place.
The pier that almost didn't survive the 1990s
The fishing pier and pedestrian trail at the heart of the park exist because of a fight that had nothing to do with recreation. In the early 1990s, public access to the old Steamboat Dock and the Hudson River itself was under threat. A small group of residents formed the Verplanck Waterfront Preservation Committee under the direction of Marie Pritchard and worked with the Town of Cortlandt and the conservation group Scenic Hudson to keep the shoreline open to the public. The Town Board eventually voted to protect that access.
To pay for the improvements, the committee ran a personalized brick fundraiser in the mid-1990s that raised more than sixteen thousand dollars, brick by brick, from residents who wanted their names literally embedded in the result. The rebuilt park was completed and rededicated in July 1997. Pritchard led the committee for more than eleven years, long enough that a pavilion in the park was dedicated in her honor in 2002.
Over the following decades, the Town of Cortlandt used state and local grant dollars to grow the park from roughly one acre at the old Steamboat Dock to nearly thirty acres today, connecting a pedestrian trail, a fishing and crabbing pier, an overlook with benches, a boat launch, and a playground. There's one more detail worth knowing if you use the pier: Verplanck is the only stretch of shoreline between New York City and Albany where the railroad tracks don't run between the town and the river, which is the entire reason unbroken pedestrian access to the Hudson was worth fighting for here in the first place.
The pattern underneath the Sunday routine
| Feature | What it looks like now | Where it actually started |
|---|---|---|
| Market on the River | Sunday vendors, music, yoga, May through October | Mt. Carmel Field, before its 2021 move to the waterfront |
| Cortlandt Community Rowing | Roughly 90 members, hangar boathouse, Hudson and lake rowing | A dump site at Lake Meahagh, cleared on one councilman's hunch |
| The waterfront trail and pier | Nearly 30 acres of public river access | A citizen preservation fight over Steamboat Dock in the early 1990s |
None of this happened because a county master plan called for it, though a 2015 waterfront plan did later formalize some of what was already underway, including the idea of refurbishing those old hangars for the rowing club. The recreation you use on a Sunday in Verplanck exists because Marie Pritchard, then Frank Farrell, then a nonprofit called Let It Shine each decided the neglect in front of them was worth fixing, and then did the unglamorous work of fixing it.
If you're heading down there this month, the market runs through the fall on its usual Sunday schedule, the boat launch stays open under its town permit, and the pier is exactly as good for crabbing in September as it was in June. What changes, once you know the backstory, is how you see the ordinary act of parking off Riverview Avenue on a Sunday morning. It isn't background. It's the result of three people who refused to accept that a dump, a threatened dock, and a market with no permanent home were just how things were going to stay.
If you're thinking about what it actually means to live near a corner of Westchester that gets rebuilt this way, one resident at a time, Sami Vecchiolla knows the Town of Cortlandt well enough to talk through it block by block. Let's Connect.
