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The New York Times is reporting that the Brooklyn House of Detention is going to be turned into a novel mixed-use building: a jail-mall! That's right-- the mayor is pushing for a 24,000 square foot mall in the bottom stories of the colossally ugly building on the corner of Atlantic and Boerum Place:
The biggest question may now be which businesses the Department of Correction, the property's landlord, will bring to this increasingly residential section of Boerum Hill.City and borough officials have publicly suggested a high-end food store, a children's clothing outlet or law offices. But retailing experts, community groups and New York City business owners interviewed Friday had their own ideas.
"There's a tremendous amount of potential to sell what I call the nifty-gifties," said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm. "You have a captive audience, even with the visitors," he added. Forget boutique stores. "Think of it as more of an upscale airport gift shop."
The Department of Corrections also wants to renovate the top stories of the building to house 1600 inmates-- about double the old capacity before the jail was closed. Of course, executives at all the major chains said they wouldn't be caught dead associating their brands with a prison, and neighborhood activists think the idea is stupid, ridiculous, and a bad-fit for the neighborhoods.
We liked one of the previous ideas for the building: turning it into high-priced condos. Why? Because if you're paying $750k for a 500sqft apartment, you're living in a jail cell anyway-- why not go whole hog?
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Call it a detention center in Bk. and it's "colosally ugly". Put it at 2 Columbus Circle and it deserves to be protected as a landmark. Go figure.
I live right next to this "collassally ugly" structure and actually don't think it's that ugly. That said, what we definitely don’t need in this neighborhood is any shop that remotely resembles an "upscale airport gift shop".
Initial impressions of the admittedly strange juxtaposition of retail and detention aside, is the mixed use idea really all that bad?
And if you think a jail-mail idea is a bad idea, how about a jail-bank? I don't know if it's still operational, but in Litchfield, Conn. there used to be a town lock-up which shared a common brick wall with a bank. There's a silent film script in that situation somewhere...
The jail cells will probably still be larger than my bedroom.
According to channel 11, one of the possible things they could be putting there is a "upscale supermarket".
The nifty gifty idea is horrible. All it does is let some corporations profit off of the families of prisoners. Given the socioeconomic demographics of who goes to prison in New York City, I see a problem with this. But the alternative, turning the jail's lower floors into an upscale mall to assuage its impact on the gentirfication of the neighborhood, doesn't seem like any kind of real solution to the problem either.
yeah, I fondly look back at the good ol' days of how this facility is manhandled.
Back in 2004, the House of Detention was planned to be used to house all those feisty, unwieldy protesters at the RNC.
And fitting enough, never done.