Behind the bars: Dark history of Rikers Is.
Built on mud, garbage & corruption, notorious jail was always a hellhole
EVEN before it was a prison, Rikers Island was home to crooks.
Magistrate Richard Riker, owner of the island in the early 1800s, was a descendant of the German-Dutch von Rycken family, which had held the island in its possession since the 1600s.
Riker’s contemptible side gig involved rubber-stamping from his judge’s bench paperwork that allowed free black men, women and children to be kidnapped off New York City’s streets and trafficked down South as slaves.
“It was a plague,” said Jacob Morris, director of the Harlem Historical Society. “And this was the patriarch of Rikers.”
But Magistrate Riker was just the beginning.
The island has been a human grist mill for nearly two centuries, eventually becoming home to hundreds of thousands of criminals a year as the city’s largest jail.
It is now such a hellhole that city officials want to shut it down permanently.
Morris said the island’s name should be changed.
“How about Correction Island?” he suggested to The Post.
“Or better yet,” he said, “The Island That Needs Correction.”
THE marshy island has never been considered prime real estate, which has contributed to its sordid history.
Years after Riker, the island was used as a training ground for Union Army regiments, a last stop before they headed south to fight in the Civil War.
In between encampments, pigs were raised on the island for slaughter.
After the war, on July 3, 1884, the city bought the island from the last of the Riker-family owners, John T. Wilson, for $180,000, with the intent of building a workhouse.
But the island lay silent for the next 30 years.
Then in the 1920s, the city decided it would be just the right spot for building a jail to replace the small, crumbling Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary on what’s now Roosevelt Island.
Rikers Island was then a mere 87.5 acres and ringed by shoals just under the waterline.
A jail would require more land, officials decided.
The problem was solved by using convict labor to build up the island with trash delivered by barge from Manhattan. The trash proved troublesome. “The rats grew so numerous and so large that the department imported dogs in an effort to eliminate the rats,” Heather Rogers writes in her 2005 book, “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.”
“The dogs were not fed by the authorities but lived solely on the rats. Despite this . . . the rats continued to multiply.” Then came the explosions. “Gases . . . were constantly exploding through the soil covering and bursting into flames . . . in the summer, the ground resembled a sea of small volcanos, all breathing smoke and flames,” Rogers writes.
Out of this literal hell rose the Rikers Island we know today.
RIKERS Island first opened its doors to inmates in 1932, seven years after the city first debated putting a jail there.
In the following decades, Rikers’ infamy only grew as the lockup became known for violence between prison gangs, hard-boiled inmates and their sometimes brutal keepers.
Within just seven years of opening, a Bronx court decried its conditions, saying it was filthy and overcrowded and plagued by a growing trade in contraband.
But the next year, inmates were put to work turning one of its garbage dumps into a tree farm, which grew thousands of shrubs and trees that were transplanted into city parks.
There were other brief moments of decency in its history.
ON a snowy February night in 1957, a Miami-bound DC-6A plane carrying 95 passengers took off from La Guardia Airport, only to crash onto the island and explode minutes later. Twenty people died. The correction officers on duty that night allowed the 69 inmates who had been signed up for snow-removal duty to help free the remaining passengers from the burning wreckage.
“I don’t know if all of us would’ve even gotten out without them,” passenger Kenneth Kronen, now 89, told The Post from his home on the Upper East Side.
In 1959, the city also created a school, PS 616, on Rikers to help educate its imprisoned masses.
In 1965, the artist Salvador Dalí donated a painting for its walls as an apology for not being able to get to a talk about art for the prisoners.
The work was swiped in March 2003 and replaced with a fake.
Three employees were charged with the theft, but the painting was never found.
Over the years, violence soared as the jail became more crowded — fueled by the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s — and as rival drug gangs that fought for turf on the streets also waged bloody battles inside the walls.
PLENTY of boldfaced names found themselves locked up with common thieves and violent felons over the decades.
“Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz was busted in 1977 after a murder spree that left six women dead and terrorized the city.
Berkowitz spent time at the jail until pleading guilty in 1978, when he was transferred upstate.
Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious spent seven weeks at Rikers after cops found his girlfriend Nancy Spungen stabbed to death in the Chelsea Hotel in 1978.
He was charged with seconddegree murder, then released on bail, but got locked up again for getting into a barroom brawl.
Vicious got out in early 1979 while awaiting trial. He was found dead of a drug overdose the next day after a night of celebrating.
Mark David Chapman was sent to Rikers after killing John Lennon outside The Dakota apartment building in December 1980. He was later transferred upstate to Attica.
Republican state Sen. Guy Velella was forced to quit in 2004 after he was convicted of taking $137,000 in bribes to help companies get state contracts.
Although sentenced to a year, he spent only 182 days on Rikers.
Hip-hop stars also did time on the island.
DMX spend 40 days there after he was busted in 2005 after failing to take a mandated drug test and refusing to go into treatment.
Lil Wayne was sentenced to a year in prison at Rikers after copping to a weapons charge in 2010.
Ex-Giants receiver Plaxico Burress was on Rikers in 2009 after accidentally shooting himself inside a Manhattan club.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former head of the International Monetary Fund and a onetime French presidential candidate, also got locked up on Rikers after he was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in Midtown.
The Manhattan DA later dropped the case.
MORRIS, of the Harlem Historical Society, has lobbied for years to change the name of the blighted island so that it no longer bears the moni- ker of Magistrate Riker.
But even with the jail’s modernday infamy, his petition has hardly caught fire. It still only had 33 signatures Monday.
There are others pulling for a different moniker.
Last week, it surfaced that a blue-ribbon panel was recommending the jail be shut and potentially replaced by new facilities across the five boroughs.
“Rikers is a mass-incarceration model that stains everything that it touches,” said former state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who led the panel. “Rikers is by any standard a penal colony. It’s a penal colony. It’s a 19th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”
Days later, city Public Advocate Letitia James proposed renaming the island after Kalief Browder, the young man who hanged himself in 2015 after three abusive years as a teen inmate on Rikers.
Browder’s family has expressed mixed feelings about the “honor.”
TheT rats grew so numerous and so large that the department imported dogs in an effort to eliminate the rats. — Author Heather Rogers, in her book “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage”