But the island had yet another career. For a century, it housed a grim penitentiary, where inmates passed their sentences along the banks of the East River, within tempting sight of freedom on the nearby shores.
The penitentiary, a long gray arcaded structure, was completed in 1832 on what was then Blackwell’s Island. Castlelike crenelations running along the roofline and a chubby turreted tower of a “feudal character” lent a “certain rudeness” to the work, according to Appleton’s Dictionary of New York of 1886.
The New York Spectator reported in 1836 that the original plan had been to split the island in half with a canal to separate male and female inmates. This precaution was never taken, although the women got their own building.
The name of the architect has been lost.
The original prison population on Blackwell’s Island was in the hundreds, and in 1838 the staff of 24 included a quarry master and a coxswain to pilot the island boat. There was no mollycoddling the inmates in those days: John Bowen, convicted in 1839 of stealing a basket, was sentenced to three months breaking rocks. But there was preferential treatment: William M. Tweed, serving time in 1874, had a private unlocked room and a secretary.
The sight of river traffic going by tortured the prisoners. In 1853 12 nude men swam for freedom and were spotted coming out of the water at what is now Long Island City; it is not clear if they were apprehended. In 1875 Dutch Harmon, a highwayman described by The New York Times as “one of the most desperate criminals in the country,” organized the mass escape of seven prisoners while wearing a ball and chain.
Yet Patrick Hayes, the warden in 1910, described the penitentiary to The New York Times as a place “as pleasant as the Thousand Islands.” The convicts, he said, worked in “big airy rooms through which cool breezes sweep,” with views of “the yachts of millionaires” gliding past. Thomas Edison cruised past the island with cameras rolling in 1903; his short film is posted on YouTube.
Two years later David D. Lewis, who was serving 12 months for fraud, dared to differ. He made a brazen escape attempt, climbing up one of the stone abutments of the Queensboro Bridge and grabbing hold of a cable. Ignoring police gunfire from the island, he climbed hand over hand to the girders and then to the roadway, where he found two bicycle policemen waiting.
A report issued in 1914 by Katharine Davis, the commissioner of correction, described the prison as “vile and inhuman” and “wet, slimy, dark, foul.” Later that year, 700 of the 1,400 prisoners joined an uprising that lasted for days.
But one keeper, quoted in The Times, said: “They have it easy here, and are too humanely treated. They need a little harsh treatment to make them realize what a fine hotel they are living in.”
In any event, not much changed. A raid by the Department of Correction in 1934 found gangs ruling the prison with the complicity of the warden and his deputy. Knives and drugs were discovered in cells. Joseph Rao, a member of the Dutch Schultz gang who was imprisoned in the 1930s, kept a flock of homing pigeons on the roof, for importing narcotics. Instead of stripes, he wore silk shirts and dressing gowns.
By Rao’s time, a prison was going up on Rikers Island, and the penitentiary was on its way out. In 1939, the same year John Garfield starred in the movie “Blackwell’s Island — Alcatraz of the East,” a hospital for chronic diseases opened on the site. Now the Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility, it was designed by Kohn Butler and York Sawyer. Its chevron-shaped wings, canted back to face the river, have a marine character, like the conning towers on Arizona-type battleships.
These will vanish within a few years, replaced by a complex of shiny, sharp, angular structures that, judging by published renderings and animations, look like the desert headquarters of a giant mortgage company in Arizona. At their feet, all around, will lie the last traces of the penitentiary and its inmates: much of the rocky sea wall was created with stone they quarried.
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