|
||||||||
  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
History haunts Manhattan's Tombs jail
By Harriet Ryan
NEW YORK (Court TV) -- It doesn't matter if you are P. Diddy or a transvestite prostitute, a Wall Street banker or a subway fare beater, if you get arrested anywhere in Manhattan by the New York Police Department, you'll end up in the Tombs. For more than 160 years, the massive jail on Centre Street in lower Manhattan has housed those awaiting arraignment or trial. Known officially as the Bernard B. Kerik Complex and initially as MDC -- for Manhattan Detention Complex, it is called simply the Tombs by everyone from the mayor to the 20,000 handcuffed men shuffled through its doors every year. The jail is the largest receiving area in the country. More than 500 corrections officers supervise some 850 inmates. Its long history makes it one of the most storied prisons in the country. The city fathers ordered The Tombs built in 1835 on swampy land that had once been a lake known as the Collect. The architect, recently returned from a trip to Egypt modeled the jail after a mausoleum he had seen there, giving the granite structure a striking edifice and eventually the nickname, the Tombs. "It promises to be one of the handsomest of our public buildings," one newspaper predicted at its opening. The jail was divided into sections based on the crimes charged. Men arrested for more severe crimes like murder and arson were kept on one floor while burglars and robbers were held on another. A few months after the Tombs opened to prisoners, the building began to sink into the swampland, making it even more inhospitable to inmates. Then in 1842, fire struck the jail. A wealthy professional man, John Colt, the brother of revolver inventor Samuel Colt, was convicted of the hatchet murder of another businessman and sentenced to die in the Tombs by hanging. Shortly before his execution, he stabbed himself death in his cell. According to the Museum of the City of New York, a candle or lamp was knocked over in the resulting confusion, igniting a blaze that destroyed sections of the jail. Colt's execution would have been among about 50 that took place in the Tombs. Prisoners were marched from their cells, across a bridge within the jail nicknamed "The Bridge of Sighs" and then hung in a gallows set up in one of the prison yards. The Tombs' conditions were so notorious that Herman Melville had the title character of his 1853 classic short story "Bartelby the Scrivener" die alone in a dank yard of the Tombs. During the Civil War, Confederate POWs were jailed in the Tombs alongside New York's accused thieves and murderers. After the war, Boss Tweed, the leader of the Tammany Hall political machine, was arrested and sent to the Tombs. On his way there, he reportedly ordered his dinner sent over to the jail from the tony restaurant Delmonico's. In 1902, the jail was entirely rebuilt in the style of a French chateau, but people continued to call it the Tombs. The jail and the rest of the city's prison department made headlines in 1914 when a woman, Katharine Bement Davis, was named the first female corrections commissioner and in fact, the first woman to ever lead a major municipal agency. Davis took charge of the Tombs and the department's $2 million budget before women had the right to vote. Conditions at the jail continued to be crowded and unsanitary. In August 1970, a riot broke out and inmates took five corrections officers hostage and began setting fires. They demanded to meet with Mayor John Lindsay about conditions at the Tombs, but he declined. Instead the inmates bargained press coverage about the substandard state of the jail for the release of hostages. As a result of the riot, the jail was torn and a modern facility built in its place. Women were recruited for the staff and now close to 50 percent of the corrections officers are female.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
