The Courthouse That Outlived Its Jail, Twice

The candy striped tower ahead on your left looks like it wandered off a European cathedral and got lost in Greenwich Village, all red brick, black stone, and pointed arches. It was built between eighteen seventy four and eighteen seventy seven as a criminal courthouse, replacing an earlier wooden fire lookout tower that had stood on this spot since the eighteen thirties as part of the old Jefferson Market. For decades it heard cases from one of the city's rowdiest entertainment districts, including the arraignment of a man who murdered a famous architect in a rooftop restaurant across town.

Right next door, though, stood something far grimmer. In nineteen thirty two, the city opened a new jail on the adjoining lot, an Art Deco tower sometimes called the only one of its kind ever built anywhere. Because it rose directly above a busy sidewalk, women locked up inside could lean toward the bars and actually call down to friends and family standing in the street below, a strange kind of visiting hour the architects never intended. Over the decades the jail held an unusually well known roster of prisoners, including Dorothy Day, Ethel Rosenberg, and later Angela Davis, who became an outspoken critic of conditions inside after her own stay there. Testimony from other former inmates about mistreatment by prison doctors helped turn public opinion against the place, and the city finally closed it in nineteen seventy one, then tore it down a couple of years after that.

The courthouse beside it, meanwhile, had already stopped hearing cases in nineteen forty five and sat empty until local preservationists convinced the public library system to take it over. It reopened as a branch library in nineteen sixty seven and still operates that way today, a Gothic survivor standing watch over a garden that replaced the jail that once stood at its side.