An Update on the Manhattan Borough Based Jail in Chinatown
Since our last update in March, the City lifted the temporary stop work order following the cracks in Chung Pak Senior Housing and resumed demolition despite the community’s pleas for an independent monitor to be installed. Demolition is projected to conclude as soon as January 2025.
Throughout the demolition, the community continued to experience high levels of air contamination, noise, and traffic congestion.
In April, photographer Anh Nguyen helped us document the detrimental results of the demolition. These powerful stories from the perspective of a resident, small business owner, and health care provider illustrate the decline in quality of life, including the difficult decision made by Charles B. Wang Community Health Center to reduce vital health services and relocate their entire pediatric wing. While the City has ensured they are taking measures to mitigate the harmful effects of the demolition, we’ve experienced the contrary - dust billowing over the site, trucks idling without covers that would prevent debris from falling out, and noise levels beyond the allowed limit.
After pushing for an independent monitor, the City announced in late October that an independent monitor was selected to oversee the remainder of the demolition phase.
While this is much-welcomed news and the community is eager to work with the monitor, we remain committed to ensuring this independent monitor will remain throughout the entire project, including the construction of the Borough Based Jail.
Our stance has been unchanged. While we recognize the borough-based jail plan is in place to close Rikers Island detention centers by 2027, planning should not come at the detriment of a community. In order to expedite the closing of Riker’s and to lessen the impact on the community, we have been continuously pushing the City to build a smaller jailer and provide the Chinatown community with transparency.
Chinatown has a delicate socioeconomic fabric that is no stranger to having jails within the community. The Manhattan Detention Center (MDC), also known as the Tombs, sat on the very site that the proposed Manhattan Borough Based Jail will be. Further south is the now-defunct Manhattan Correctional Center (MCC), a federal prison, on Park Row, an area that remains unopened to its full capacity since 9/11. The design and construction of both correctional facilities did not include the input of the community and raised significant issues around the stigma of the community, heavily impacting its ability to maintain steady visitor traffic that gives stability to its small businesses and further suppressing economic growth. We are seeing this play out now for the third time, with the added complications of recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and, still, 9/11.
We call upon the City to revisit their current plan and to work with the community to arrive at a solution that will not only enable them to close Rikers sooner but to also do so in a way that considers the needs of Chinatown’s residents, visitors, and small businesses. Since the resumption of the demolition phase, we have worked closely with our local electeds and other community organizations to advocate for the following changes:
Building a smaller jail - A smaller jail can be built faster and safer with less impact to taxpayer dollars- effectively enabling the City to reach their goal of closing Rikers sooner.
Providing the Chinatown community transparency and ensuring a seat at the table when it comes to decisions - we strongly believe that the City should make additional efforts to involve more of the Chinatown community. By providing them a seat at the table, the City can help increase community participation and awareness, which will encourage more residents and small business owners to learn more about the jail plan so that they can provide insightful input and raise the alarm on urgent issues. In addition, it can create an open communication channel between the city and the community, which will, circling back to the previous point on accountability, foster trust from the community members that their concerns are being accounted for, thereby fortifying the City's relationship with the Chinatown community.
Extending the independent monitor - it is imperative that the independent monitor continues their work through the entirety of the construction phase. This will provide transparency and accountability and strengthen community trust. As the monitor provides unbiased oversight of construction activities, it will ensure that they adhere to safety, environmental, and regulatory standards on behalf of the community. This has already helped address concerns proactively and foster a safer development process. As this construction period will be lengthier than that of the demolition, the Chinatown community needs a consistently present and unbiased advocate that will ensure on their behalf that the project does not come at the detriment of their health and safety.
To learn more about the potential dangers of the existing Manhattan Borough Based Jail plan on the Chinatown community, read through this extensive presentation developed by Ideas of Order, Neighbors United Below Canal, and Welcome to Chinatown.
Please join us in our call to action to stop the construction of the megajail and to give our community the voice it deserves in decision-making around the borough-based jail plan by taking the following steps:
Please contact your city council member regarding your concerns with the City’s moving forward with the current megajail construction plan and implore that they consider the community’s requests for transparency and direct involvement in the decision-making process of how the plan should move forward. You can find who your council member is through the NYC Council directory. We suggest using the following script during your outreach (if you’re reaching out via email, we highly encourage you to tailor the language slightly to avoid being caught in spam filters)
Dear [CITY COUNCIL MEMBER]:
I’m reaching out as a concerned citizen regarding the City’s plans to move forward with the Manhattan Chinatown borough-based jail plan. Constructing the tallest jail in the world will cause irreversible harm to an already-marginalized historic community; we have already seen this with the harmful health and environmental risks that the demolition phase has caused. Furthermore, New Yorkers’ tax dollars will be supporting a large-scale project that is beyond the current budgetary means. This is not the solution to closing Rikers. We ask that you consider alternative options to the Chinatown megajail and to bring in the Chinatown community as one of the primary decision-makers in all plans moving forward.If you walk by the White St. jail location and see large amounts of dust and debris in the air and the surrounding area coming from the site…
Please take photo and video documentation and call 311 to file a complaint
AND reach out to Xiaomin Zhao, Outreach Coordinator, Intergovernmental Affairs - Borough-Based Jail Program at the Department for Design and Construction at Zhaoxi@ddc.nyc.gov. This is so that the City has written records of community-monitored instances and will require them to address these issues.
We also encourage you to send any evidence you’ve documented to us so that we can keep track of reported issues - please reach out to Sherry, our Community Engagement Fellow at sherry@welcometochinatown.com.
