The Tombs

The original Tombs was officially known as the Halls of Justice, built in 1838 in an Egyptian Revival architectural style, similar in form to a mastaba.

The building site had been created by filling in the Collect Pond that was the principal water source for Colonial New York City.

Industrialization and population density by the late 18th century resulted in the severe pollution of the Collect, so it was condemned, drained, and filled in by 1817.

The heavy masonry of Haviland's design was built atop vertical piles of lashed hemlock tree trunks in a bid for stability, but the entire structure began to sink soon after it was opened.

Charles Dickens wrote about the jail in American Notes: "Such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world!

A fire destroyed part of the building on November 18, 1842, the same day that a notorious killer named John C. Colt was due to be hanged.

[7] Convicted murderer and New York City politician William J. Sharkey earned national notoriety for escaping from the prison disguised as a woman on November 22, 1872.

The 795,000 square foot[11] Art Deco architecture facility was designed by architects Harvey Wiley Corbett and Charles B.

[15] Inmates rioted on August 10, 1970, after multiple warnings about falling budgets, aging facilities, and rising populations, and after an informational picket of City Hall by union correctional officers drawing attention to the pressures.

[17] Within a month after the riot, the New York City Legal Aid Society filed a landmark class action suit on behalf of pre-trial detainees held in the Tombs.

The city decided to close the Tombs on December 20, 1974, after years of litigation and after federal judge Morris E. Lasker agreed that the prison's conditions were so bad as to be unconstitutional.

[19] The jail was named The Bernard B. Kerik Complex in December 2001 at the direction of New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

[24] Two artists also filed a lawsuit to preserve artwork that was displayed on the Tombs' facade, but U.S. district judge Lewis A. Kaplan declined to grant an injunction,[25] and seven murals were subsequently removed.

An Egyptian-Revival-style building on a street corner; there are doric columns on the façade to the right of the image. There are men on the street, and work is being done using cranes, on an adjacent building out of frame to the right.
The original Egyptian-Revival -style Tombs building in a photograph from 1893. Leonard Street, left. Centre Street, right.
The Manhattan House of Detention (left) was built in 1941, at the same time as the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse (right) . It became the South Tower of the expanded and renamed Manhattan Detention Complex once the new North Tower opened in 1990.