Manhattan Chinatown advocates seek a middle ground on 124-25 White Street before machinery breaks literal ground. Residents have long protested against the borough-based jail planned in the neighborhood but now propose moving construction to a nearby location and repurposing the two-acre plot for affordable housing and green space.
On Monday, June 2, the advocates revealed their proposal outside the 124-25 White Street construction site, which currently sits at ground zero next to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse after an extensive demolition process.
“We’re not here just to protest,” said Jan Lee, co-founder of Neighbors United Below Canal. “We’re here to offer an alternative: a vision that puts housing first on that spot, a vision that supports a livable Chinatown, [and] a vision that recognizes the need for a court-adjacent detention but not at the cost of destroying a neighborhood to get there.”
Lee, arguably the Chinatown jail’s fiercest opponent, pointed to a new location: the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), which currently sits empty just a short walk from 124-25 White Street. The federal jail closed in 2021 due to disrepair. The advocates’ proposal would refurbish the MCC instead of building a new jail in Chinatown.
However, the correctional facility falls under the federal Bureau of Prisons, so it would require extensive congressional backing for the city to obtain it. Lee said proponents already reached out to Senator Chuck Schumer for assistance. The senator did not respond to requests for comment.
Four borough-based jails will house the remaining population detained by the NYC Department of Corrections (DOC) after Rikers Island’s mandated closure by 2027. However, construction will run far past the deadline, with Chinatown’s facility tabbed for completion in 2032.
The new jails — one for each borough except Staten Island — boast a “more humane” approach than at Rikers Island, which remains marred with violence and disrepair. A key factor is proximity to the criminal courts to speed up case times, since the current city jail population is overwhelmingly held on pretrial detention. The borough-based approach would also allow families and lawyers to visit more frequently — the remote Rikers Island is only reachable by one MTA line, the Q100.
Transport to the city’s criminal courts across the five boroughs costs more than $30 million a year and violence often stems from those trips, which start before dawn. While the current White Street location is right next door to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on 100 Centre Street, the Civic Center-based MCC would remain in close proximity.
The initial site for the Manhattan jail was slated for the former Civic Center bordering Chinatown at 80 Centre Street, but the city later pivoted to 124-25 White Street where another jail stood — the Manhattan Detention Complex, a.k.a the Tombs.
While borough-based jails will hold fewer people than a Rikers Island jail, they require significant space for programming and medical facilities (more than half the current Rikers population receives mental health services). The Chinatown jail’s design specifically faced community backlash from the likes of Lee due to the near 300-foot height, which advocates say will consume the neighborhood, particularly the nearby Columbus Park.
Initially, the White Street jail was slated to stand at 450 feet, but the local pushback led to a reduction to 295 feet. Meanwhile, the Adams administration increased the number of beds in all four borough-based jails to ensure enough space for the growing Rikers Island population.
Such adjustments reduced valuable space for planned mental health services — Rikers is, by most metrics, the country’s second-largest psychiatric facility (Los Angeles County Jail being the first). The new jails would also offer rehabilitative programming, from cooking to job training, all aimed at preventing recidivism and encouraging economic empowerment.
Chinatown advocates like Lee and Evelyn Yang, the wife of ex-presidential and mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, campaigned against the jail’s placement in an already-underinvested neighborhood hit hard by 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and COVID-19.
“What Chinatown actually desperately needs is affordable housing, and we can build it here on this site for a fraction [of the jail’s cost],” said Yang. “We have a great opportunity now to right a wrong [by] finally [starting] to listen to people who live here.”
The Chinatown advocates’ proposal to move the borough-based jail to another location would open up the already-demolished lot at 124-25 White Street to build affordable housing. Their mock-up suggests the space could fit roughly 1,000 units and would reach a maximum height of 235 feet. A 25,200-square-foot open public area between the courthouse and the structure would create a wide east-west path across Chinatown and provide green space for arguably Manhattan’s last working-class community of color south of Central Park.
Since the property would be on public land, the city could designate every unit as affordable housing. Chung Pak, a neighboring senior center built in the 1980s, was the city’s last meaningful affordable housing investment in Chinatown and ironically came as a concession for building a previous jail.
124-25 White Street currently remains vacant after the city demolished the Tombs jail. Heavy equipment, including an excavator and a payloader truck, will be removed from the site this week. Lee said the proposal will race against time and need momentum before contractors begin working on the jail’s foundation.
Dana Kaplan, senior adviser to the Independent Rikers Commission, said the proposal will have to address the location’s viability and general timeline. The question remains of whether a refurbished MCC could hold 1,040 beds and provide adequate services as detailed in the borough-based jail plan.
“The planned approval process happened in 2018, so this has been a process that has been happening for years,” said Kaplan. “To begin again with a new site that is not city-owned property will certainly have significant implications for the timeline.”
The urgency stems from the need to shutter Rikers Island as soon as possible to prevent subjecting more people to the facilities’ dangerous conditions. Allegations of rampant excessive and unconstitutional use of force by staff led to a class-action settlement nearly a decade ago and subsequent mandated reforms. The city’s noncompliance with meaningfully improving conditions since then led to a federal judge greenlighting an independent receiver to take over the jails from the DOC last month.
Councilmember Christopher Marte, who represents Chinatown and fought the jail construction for years, called the MCC proposal a “win-win-win.” He said refurbishing an existing facility could be faster than building the White Street jail and would save the city money — the Manhattan borough-based jail’s price tag has ballooned to $3.8 billion.
Described as the “Guantánamo of New York,” the MCC was not built with humane conditions as a priority, but Marte believes the facility can be renovated toward the borough-based jail standards. He adds preliminary conversations with engineers indicate additional levels can be built to incorporate more beds and recreational space needed to fulfill the plan for more humane detention.
However, Chinatown proponents cannot pin down an exact timeline. Marte said “things aren’t working normally under the Trump administration,” but the White House’s volatility includes recent rumblings of a federal building fire sale (including the FBI headquarters), a potential opportunity for the city to obtain the MCC.
The MCC is also 130 feet away from the nearest Chinatown residential building, according to Marte, which will reduce the noise and environmental impact that plagued his constituents during the Tombs demolition, particularly in neighboring buildings like Chung Pak.
“One thing we’re advocating for is to not only build affordable housing here, but help our local economy, because it’ll bring a lot more foot traffic — it will bring in a lot more consumers right in the center of, in the heart of, Chinatown,” said Marte. “Also it’s going to help with housing in the whole neighborhood. We have a lot of seniors who are living in five-floor walkups. If they can move into a modern, affordable housing unit, then they will be able to age in place with dignity.”
Amy Chin, board president of the nonprofit ThinkChinatown, said the existing plan to build a jail on White Street could create a barrier along the Western edge of Chinatown.
“This site is directly across a very narrow street from where people live, and where businesses are,” said Chin. “That other site is well isolated. It has already been a jail and the construction there is going to be far less disruptive than here.”
Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who served as Manhattan borough president when the Rikers’ closure plan passed, said she would be open to an alternative site if it remained close to the courthouse, but that she firmly believes in the Independent Rikers Commission’s due diligence.
“But if everything was no before, I don’t know why it would be yes now, in terms of sites,” said Brewer. “We need a place for people to go. Rikers has to close. I’m there quite a bit and it’s horrific.”
Darren Mack, co-director of Freedom Agenda, needs more assurance about Rikers’ closure. The borough-based jail advocate pointed to the 38 people who died in or immediately after DOC custody over the past three years, almost all of whom were held on Rikers Island.
“Last ditch efforts to halt or rework the plan to close them show a callous disregard for the lives and human rights of people who would inevitably suffer by keeping those decrepit jails open any longer,” Mack said by text message.
While the borough-based jail construction delays stem from the pandemic, the growing incarcerated population also complicates the timeline to close Rikers. The city jail population topped 7,000 this year, although the number was somewhat inflated by the recent prison strikes preventing transport of already-convicted detainees to state facilities. Still, the borough-based jails can only hold a combined 4,160 beds.
To be clear, the plan is not to close Rikers Island cold turkey at the end of August 2027. Reducing the jail population allows the city to shutter current facilities one-by-one, like the Anna M. Kross Center, Rikers’ biggest jail, which closed two years ago. However, arrests increasing under the Adams administration and delayed criminal case processing times are exacerbating the city’s problem with reducing jail populations.
“We should not accept the current timeline as the fastest possible timeline to close Rikers Island,” said Kaplan. “The incoming mayor needs to dedicate a level of leadership at the highest level of City Hall to focus on expediting the plan to close Rikers Island. That includes not just ensuring that the buildings are built on a faster timeline, but also that there is a more aggressive focus on performing and improving the criminal justice systems, including working with other players and the system across New York City to safely reduce the jail population, which we know is possible.”