Marte to Mayor: House Women Detainees in Chinatown Jail Building

Outside the Manhattan Detention Complex, Councilman Christopher Marte displays his letter to Mayor Adams calling on the city to convert 124 White Street, the building on the right, into a jail for women.  Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

“It’s crucial that the mayor listen to us now more than ever.” 

Standing outside the fenced, now-former Manhattan Detention Complex at Centre and White Streets earlier this month, City Councilman Christopher Marte announced his efforts to convince Mayor Eric Adams to cease the year-and-a-half takedown of the south jail tower (aka The Tombs) and convert the building into a facility for the fewer than 300 women now housed on Rikers Island. 

The city’s current $8.5 billion borough-based jail plan [1] for closing Rikers Island calls for the women to be relocated to a co-sex facility in Kew Garden, Queens, now five years away from projected completion. In a letter [2] to Adams, co-signed by Councilwoman Lynn Schulman, who represents Kew Gardens, the council members told Adams that the women should be housed in the “safest and highest quality conditions possible” and 124 White Street, with its nearly 1,000-bed capacity, offers that option.

“We have a plan that can stop the wait, fix these jails, and have a state-of-the-art facility for women only that achieves the goals of the borough-based jail plan,” Marte said at the press briefing.

An Adams spokesman did not return a request for comment. City officials previously told the Trib that the renovation of 124 White Street would be “unfeasible” because the building “could not withstand the extent of the renovation required.”

Last October the city began moving women detainees from Rikers Island to a state facility in Bedford Hills in Westchester County, two hours from the city, to relieve staff shortages. A few months later, the city’s Department of Correction announced that the women would be moved back, due in part to the difficulties posed to visiting attorneys and families.

Some state legislators and women’s advocates have been pushing to move the female detainees to the state-owned Lincoln Correctional Facility on 110th Street, but it appears unlikely that the state will agree. “At this point there is still no commitment from the state or indication from the state that the Lincoln Correctional Facility is available for the city to use,” Dana Kaplan, former deputy director the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, told Crain’s New York Business.

“It’s much easier to have [124 White Street] changed because it’s under city control,” Marte said, estimating that the renovation of the building would take six-to-eight months.

Marte, co-founder of Neighbors United Below Canal, a group formed to oppose the planned 295-foot jail tower, said both buildings should be preserved and renovated, with male detainees housed in the north tower. In the meantime, he has also written a letter [3] to city comptroller Brad Lander, requesting a feasibility study “to tell us why this isn’t possible.” Community Board 1’s Executive Committee on June 23 endorsed the request. A spokeswoman for Lander said in an email that the comptroller’s office is “setting up a conversation” with Marte’s office to discuss the proposal.  

Alice Blank, vice chair of Community Board 1 and an architect, said at the briefing that there is “no reason” why the two buildings cannot be retrofitted and reused. Architects associated with both structures, she said, “believe unequivocally there is no need to demolish these buildings.”

In a March letter to Adams, Peter Samton, the architect who headed the 1983 renovation of the Tombs, urged the mayor to reconsider the demolition of the structure, noting that the building’s interior was removed and redesigned and the cells reduced in number and enlarged in size. Classrooms and gyms as well as two rooftop recreation areas also were added. 

“A renovation to adapt and reuse the existing complex,” he wrote, “will be a significantly more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable solution which will help expedite the city’s closing of the jails on Rikers Island in 2027.”

In addition, Blank noted, the south tower, along with the connected New York City Criminal Court building at 100 Centre Street, have been “deemed worthy of evaluation as a New York City landmark by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission,” something the city never took into account, she said, when devising its plan.

A 2009 report by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation concluded that the criminal court building and south tower are together eligible for inclusion in the National Register. The report called the buildings “an impressive example of Moderne civic architecture in New York City” and significant for their association with the history of criminal law.

“This project is directly at odds with the the core of the city’s justice reform initiatives, the city’s needed budget priorities, the city’s climate policies and the city’s preservation efforts,” Blank said.