Chinatown Jail Construction Starting Soon, Will Continue for Years

To make an omelette, the hoary apothegm goes, you have to break few eggs. And so it will be with the Chinatown Jail, whose construction will rise from what is presently an ice-crusted hole on White Street between Centre and Baxter Streets until, years later, it’s among the most beautiful high rise jails in the world—maybe the most beautiful. How many years? Well, that’s a most interesting question.

The answer, at present, is 2032, at a projected cost of around $3.9 billion. To accomplish this feat in the city where the Empire State Building was built in just over 13 1/2 months, the contractor, Tutor Perini, said it will work from 6 a.m. to midnight, Monday through Friday, and 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. Construction will start “soon.”

Considering that the Borough Based Jail program (BBJ) is already years late in building and hundreds millions of dollars over its originally proposed budget, there’s little reason to take the most recent words—as heard during a heated January 23 Zoom meeting— of the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC), or any of its government or industry partners as gospel. This isn’t DDC’s fault. As an agency, they are highly competent and unusually dutiful. It’s what DDC is tasked to do, which is to effect plans that, from their secretive inception in 2017, were at best unrealistic and at worst willfully dishonest, that are at issue.

Straus News has covered the furor since its public beginning. In September 2018, our reporter began “City officials presenting plans for a new 1,510-bed detention center in Lower Manhattan [at 80 Centre Street] were repeatedly interrupted with chants of ‘no jail!’ from angry Chinatown residents at a contentious Sept. 12 meeting at P.S. 124 in Chinatown.”

“Closing Rikers is a laudable goal,” offered Nicholas Stabile, a resident of a Park Row coop near the proposed jail site. “But the process employed by the Mayor’s Office to achieve this goal focuses on only half the equation—the people inside the jail. It ignores the other half of the equation—the people in the surrounding community.” Rather than consulting locals before releasing the plan, Stabile continued, the De Blasio administration “came in with a fully baked plan that burdens the community and provides almost no benefits.”

This criticism about the lack of community involvement was echoed by then-Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and District 1 Council Member Magaret Chin, though both withheld judgement on the BBJ scheme generally.

A month later, at a City Hall rally decrying the influence on the Real Estate Board of New York on city planning generally, the issue of the proposed Chinatown Jail was front and center. “No community should have 40 stories of cages and retail underneath,” said Jan Lee of the Chinatown Core Block Association It is a savage concept.”

That December, just in time for Christmas, Mayor De Blasio—who has rarely been described as a good manager even by those who like him personally—pulled the old swithcheroo, swapping out the prior site for a new one with the same casual disregard for the community as before.

“The proposal to build at 125 White St. represents a shift from the city’s initial plan, released in August, to locate the new jail a few blocks south at 80 Centre Street,” Straus News reported. “The change in sites, which was hastily announced and was not accompanied by updates to detailed official documentation prepared for the Centre Street location, has prompted procedural complaints from some downtown residents and elected officials, many of whom still harbor lingering concerns about construction noise, traffic disruptions, parking and safety.”

By the following spring, things had shaken out some: “The latest plans, detailed in a draft environmental impact statement issued March 22 [2019], contemplate a new 1.27 million square foot jail tower that would be 450 feet tall and have a capacity of 1,437 beds.” These numbers, it was noted, were a reduction from an earlier proposal for a tower 45 feet taller and with 73 more beds.

“We view this, as an administration, as a moral imperative,” said Elizabeth Glazer, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. Glazer has since become the founder of the online and print journal Vital City, whose editorial office on West 113th Street near Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights is many worlds away from the home of the Chinatown jail. Recently, Glazer was part of Mayor-elect Mamdani’s transition team, serving on the Committee on Community Safety.

A June 2019 dispatch in OT Downtown began, “If you think the city’s plan to get rid of Rikers Island and replace it with smaller community jails in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Queens — and the pitched battle against it — feels like déjà vu, you’re not hallucinating.”

The report quoted Patricia Tsai, of the Ling Sing Association on Mott Street, who asserted that city has not adequately measured impacts of such “mammoth construction projects.” Tsai further accused officials of demonizing opponents of the plan “which,” she said, amounts to just ‘shuffling detainees around’ and putting four mini-Rikers Islands across the city.”

In June 2021, when Christopher Marte was running for the District 1 Council Seat he now holds, he said, “When the mayor announced the bill to build a jail in the heart of Chinatown, I co-founded an organization called Neighbors United Below Canal to educate residents about how bad this plan was, not only for the community, but for people who are going to be incarcerated and I didn’t believe it to be true criminal justice reform.”

Though Marte’s objections have evolved and even expanded as construction time inched near, they remain, just as beneath the arctic tundra that presently fills Columbus Park, there is stenciled graffiti that reads “Stop Chinatown Jail.”

But it’s Chinatown, or, as an iconic line in the 1974 Jack Nicholson movie of that name had it: had it, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” That movie was about Los Angeles real estate and water rights and this is Manhattan but the reasoning appears to be the same: Chinatown will always lose to somebody’s else’s “imperative.”