More than 500 people packed Columbia Street on Sunday as Hudson's Islamic community cut the ribbon on a new mosque nearly two decades in the making. The three-floor building, with room for more than 400 worshippers, replaces a small underground prayer space that had squeezed in over 200 congregants for daily prayers and left overflow crowds praying in a parking lot on Fridays.
The celebration capped a project that broke ground in 2018 but dragged through contractor troubles and ballooning costs, according to The Daily Gazette. Abdus Miah, president of the Hudson Islamic Center and the city's 2nd Ward supervisor, said the center fired its first contractor in 2023 after the company's poor-quality work had to be redone, a setback that nearly doubled construction costs along the way. Miah, who also works at Home Depot, said more than $1 million in additional payments were ultimately demanded by contractors before the project was finished.
A Decades-Long Fundraising Push
The push for a proper mosque stretches back much further than 2018. Members of Hudson's Bangladeshi community had been setting aside money for 13 years toward building a mosque at the corner of Third and Columbia streets, the Gazette reported in an earlier account of the project's struggles. The center had a site plan drawn up for the new building back in 2007, the same year it acquired the land after more than two decades of praying in another building's basement, according to the BBC.
Miah said he personally traveled to Buffalo, Paterson, New Jersey, and New York City to raise money for the build, and the project drew donations from Hudson's own Islamic community along with more than 60 mosques across the northeastern United States. Day to day, the fundraising came down to small gifts of $10, $20 and $50 from local families, Miah said, and builders agreed to accept construction payments in installments to work within the community's limited budget.
Cost figures for the project have varied depending on when they were reported. The Gazette's new account puts the price at roughly $1.9 million, while the BBC described it in 2018 as a $1.5 million structure with two minarets and a dome. The dossier does not explain whether that gap reflects revised costs, a change in scope, or simply the years between the two reports.
From a Basement to Three Floors
The old prayer space, tucked in a small underground room at 35 N. 3rd St., had long outgrown its congregation. It hosted not just daily prayers but childcare and special events tied to Islamic holidays, even as Friday crowds spilled into the parking lot behind the building, per Miah's account to the Gazette. The new mosque sits at 254 Columbia St., just two doors down from that old space, and now includes a dedicated prayer room for women.
Miah predicted congregant numbers would more than double now that the center has the space to accommodate them. He pointed out that no mosque exists between Albany and Kingston, underscoring the new building's reach beyond Hudson itself. Looking ahead, Miah said he envisions the center expanding its community outreach to include childcare, job fairs and career training.
State and local officials turned out for the opening, with state Sen. Michelle Hinchey, Assemblymember Didi Barrett and Columbia County Sheriff Jackie Salvatore all attending, according to Miah's account relayed to the Gazette.
Part of a Broader Regional Shift
Hudson's new mosque arrives amid a longer pattern of Muslim institutional growth across the state. The Hudson Valley's Muslim population had doubled over a five-year span, according to the Mid-Hudson Islamic Association, as cited by recordonline.com. The region went from a single mosque in 1990 to mosques in six communities, with more planned in Monticello and Middletown, as at least 20,000 Muslims left New York City following post-9/11 profiling, per the Council of Pakistan Organization.
Further south, Long Island has seen an even sharper expansion. The area had just four mosques in the mid-1980s and now counts 40, according to James Abdul-Lateef Poulos, cited by Newsday, with community leaders estimating at least 100,000 Muslims now call Long Island home. A planned 34,000-square-foot mosque in Shirley, expected to cost about $6 million and include a gym and indoor basketball court, would become the island's second-largest behind the 45,000-square-foot Islamic Center of Melville, Newsday reported.
Other projects described by South Shore Press show the same momentum: a proposed Beaverdam Islamic Cemetery in Bellport designed for more than 10,000 burial plots, a 15,000-square-foot expansion planned for Masjid Al-Baqi in Bethpage, and a roughly 13,000-square-foot mosque underway in Mastic-Shirley, where organizers have already raised nearly $2.3 million toward construction. For Hudson's own community, the Columbia Street building marks the end of a far smaller, far more personal version of that same long climb.
