End nigh for ‘The Tombs’
Predecessor of troubled Manhattan jail spawned famous nickname 180 years ago
Troubles at The Tombs have a long history.
The jail — officially called the Manhattan Detention Complex, though better known by its ill-omened nickname — has had a presence in lower Manhattan for nearly 200 years.
Department of Correction officials announced earlier this month the city will close the jail before November, marking the end of an era that began with its infamous moniker.
The first incarnation of The Tombs was a prison dubbed The Halls of Justice, a sweeping mid-19th century edifice on Centre St. that was built in the image of an Egyptian mausoleum, historical records show— an indication the epithet might’ve come from its resemblance to an ancient burial chamber.
But five months after it first opened in 1840, the structure — erected on a pond filled with wood pilings — began to sink.
For those held at The Halls of Justice, the descent was as literal as it was metaphorical, said Thomas McCarthy, a former journalist and retired correction staffer who has curated thousands of primary source documents and images chronicling the history of the city’s jails.
“You have to picture all of this, and what that would be like for them,” McCarthy said. “Mentally they had sunk so low, and now they were in a room that was damp and cold, and dark and dank that was sinking into the ground, just like
The latest incarnation (above) of the Manhattan Detention Center, aka The Tombs, opened in 1983 and will close by next month. Right, the second structure known as The Tombs stood from 1902 through 1941. a tomb.”
By the early 20th century, City Prison Manhattan had replaced The Halls of Justice. The new, bigger building was connected to the neighboring criminal courthouse by a “Bridge of Sighs” — its name taken from a walkway that once draped the former prison’s gallows.
Within two decades of completion, the second Tombs saw what some historians call the Correction Department’s bloodiest day: A trio of inmates died Nov. 3, 1926 after firing fatal shots at Warden Peter J. Mallon and Keeper Jeremiah Murphy in a failed escape attempt.
The next morning, the headline “5 Killed in Tombs Battle,” was splashed across the front page of the Daily News, along with an aerial photo of the gunmen dead in the prison yard.
The slaying left a permanent stain as The Tombs entered the 1940s, when a new building — called the Manhattan House of Detention — went up at 125 White St., the jail’s present day lot.
The News again reported chaos at the facility in 1970 with the Aug. 12 front-page headline “800 Rampage in Tombs Riot,” an inmate-driven uprising that required 300 cops to quell.
That same year, detainees filed a class action lawsuit against the city over conditions they claimed were unconstitutional — a court action that ultimately led to its closure in 1974.
Nine years passed before the jail’s newly-remodeled South Tower reopened
By the end of the 1960s, The Tombs became overwhelmingly overcrowded. According to reports, cells and pens designed for 925 inmates were occupied by 2,000 people. under a new name: Manhattan Detention Complex. (The facility was briefly re-christened the Bernard B. Kerik Complex after Correction Department commissioner credited for reducing jail violence. The name was changed back after the disgraced Kerik pleaded guilty to financial crimes.)
In its nearly 200 years, The Tombs has seen a number of famous faces like Boss Tweed, and has appeared in a number of well-known films, including Denzel Washington’s “American Gangster.”
Yet for McCarthy, The Tombs is a concept — and if another jail is built in lower Manhattan, he said, its legacy will surely live on.
“[It] has been the jail name with a life of its own,” he said. “Regardless its architectural style or site location in that vicinity, it’ll still be called The Tombs, [whatever] the title engraved over its front door.”