ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK: As They Break Ground On Building The World’s Tallest Jail In Chinatown, The Fabled City Is Fast Becoming A Dystopian Hellhole
New York City was once known for building monuments to trade and commerce, now it’s building the world’s tallest jail as it slides into a dystopian future
I went to college in New York City, my older brother Bob lived on Riverside Drive, and back in those days it was called ‘the Big Apple’ and the ‘city that never sleeps’. It built the world’s tallest building, twice, and was globally recognized as being the city of trade and commerce was conducted. New York, New York, the envy of the world. If you can ‘make it there’, you can make it anywhere. And now? Hoo-boy, not so good. Now as residents flee, it’s escape from New York.
“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” Genesis 11:4 (KJB)
Now, New York City has gone in the opposite direct, becoming a sanctuary city that has created homeless encampments along once-prosperous avenues, meth addicts stumbling around in a daze, with needles literally sticking out of their arms. New York City is a dark, scary place and now it will have a monument to its new dystopian status, a jail skyscraper that’s just as chilling as it sounds. In 1997, the movie ‘Escape From New York’ presented the city as a giant maximum security prison, and when the president’s plane crashed on the island, Kurt Russell’s character was sent in to rescue him, hence the snazzy title of the film. But joke’s on you, Big Apple, that is exactly what you are becoming. I wonder if skyscraper jails will become a trend, you know, just like 15-minute cities?.
New York is building the world’s tallest jail in Chinatown. Can anyone stop it?
FROM THE GUARDIAN US: For nearly two centuries, New York City’s Chinatown has been home to a quintessentially American story: immigrant workers and their families living shoulder-to-shoulder in low-slung tenements. Workers like Dennis Chung, the owner of Pasteur Grill and Noodles, a Vietnamese pho joint he’s run at the neighborhood’s western edge for 27 years – weathering disasters like 9/11, Hurricane Sandy and Covid.
Now another symbol of the American condition is taking shape, directly across from Chung’s shop: a vast new jail. At about 300ft, the new structure is expected to be the tallest correctional facility in the world. And Chung says it could be the thing that finally sinks his business. “With the jail on top of the pandemic, it might be over,” he tells me in Cantonese.
City officials and justice reform advocates say the new jail is a necessary project if they’re going to close Rikers Island, the notoriously grim jail that New York’s city council voted to shut down in 2019. That vote ordered the facility replaced by 2027 with four smaller jails throughout the city, including the one in Chinatown – which planners say will be a more humane institution conveniently located steps from downtown courthouses.
The tower will replace a much shorter jail that’s been on the site since the 1980s. But construction is well behind schedule, partially due to years of resistance from a diverse coalition that includes everyone from prison abolitionists to local landlords to, at one point, Eric Adams, who pledged to oppose the new jail when campaigning for mayor. They argue it will be an eyesore that could harm some of New York’s most vulnerable immigrants, and that its multibillion-dollar price could be far better spent elsewhere.
Adams reversed course after taking office, and now the building crews have finally arrived. Today, lunchtime conversations at Pasteur Grill and Noodles are shattered by the crashing of demolition – the overture to a process that might well last a decade. “So I’ll just need to put up with this,” says Chung, “or retire early.”
How did New York City end up moving forward with such a controversial carceral structure in the heart of its downtown? READ MORE
New York’s Controversial Skyscraper Jails
New York City is halfway through a multi-year plan to construct four new jails – one each in the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Queens. These jails will, in theory, substantially decrease the overall incarcerated population and allow the city to close the most notorious prison in the United States: Riker’s Island. However, as construction begins under new mayor Eric Adams, many stakeholders question the efficacy and fairness of the plan. Watch the full video to see all the details on these new borough-based jails.
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