NYC OPENS EX-JAIL AS SHELTER
Cent. Park site shut in 2019
A shuttered jail across the street from Central Park will be used to house some of the migrants flooding into the Big Apple, city officials said Sunday.
Manhattan’s old Lincoln Correctional Facility, which was shut down by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019 as the state’s prison population declined, is being repurposed to help accommodate asylum-seekers being bused almost daily to the five boroughs from the US border with Mexico.
“We’re grateful to the state for providing this site and partnering with the city to open this space as a temporary site for asylum-seekers as New York City continues to face this humanitarian crisis,” a City Hall rep said.
“We’ve had over 70,000 asylumseekers come through the city’s intake centers since last spring,” the representative said. “And yet hundreds of asylum-seekers continue to arrive in New York City every day. We continue to need additional financial and operational support from our partners.”
There are no jail “cells” at the site, a source said, adding it is designed to be a temporary “respite” for adult migrants.
The 10,000-square-foot facility, a onetime minimum-security state prison, has been used in the past by the Young Women’s Hebrew Association and the city school system and once housed US troops during World War II.
The location, on West 110th Street on the northern end of Central Park, has been vacant since the state shut it down in September 2019, the city rep said. At that time, it was mainly being used for work-release program for nonviolent drug offenders, according to the West Side Spirit.
State officials recently recommended the former jail as a shelter to accommodate the unprecedented flow of migrants into the city, which has run out of housing space for the asylum-seekers.
The Roosevelt Hotel and other Manhattan sites have already been overflowing.
Mayor Adams has estimated that the migrant crisis will cost the city more than $4.3 billion through next spring, as city officials have become so desperate in their scramble to find space for newcomers that they have controversially begun shipping busloads to motels and hotels elsewhere in the state.
Last week, officials on Long Island said they would hire a lawyer to block the flow of migrants into their local hotels and motels, while upstate officials have passed legislation trying to thwart the busing of New York City migrants into their communities, too. On Wednesday, City Council members ventured to Albany to plead for help from state lawmakers.