The Tombs

The detention complex on your left has carried the same grim nickname for nearly two centuries, long after the building that earned it was torn down.

The original jail went up on this block between eighteen thirty five and eighteen thirty eight, designed by the architect John Haviland, a specialist in prison design, in a heavy Egyptian Revival style, its facade built to resemble an ancient tomb or temple, with thick columns and a massive, windowless look. New Yorkers started calling it the Tombs almost immediately, and the name stuck even as the building's purpose never changed. The British novelist Charles Dickens toured it during his eighteen forty two visit to New York and described it afterward as a dismal, bastard Egyptian pile that looked, in his words, like an enchanter's palace in a melodrama. The jail held about three hundred prisoners at a time and, like other city jails of that era, carried out hangings privately within its own walls, after New York State outlawed public executions and required them to happen inside a jail rather than in the street.

That first building came down in nineteen oh two, replaced by a new city prison on the same spot. The replacement included an enclosed overpass four stories above Franklin Street, connecting the jail directly to the new Manhattan Criminal Courts Building next door. Prisoners crossed it after sentencing, on a walk so bleak that New Yorkers started calling it the Bridge of Sighs, after the famous covered bridge in Venice that connected a courthouse to a prison in much the same way.

The nickname outlived every building that carried it. Through a nineteen forty one replacement and the modern detention complex that followed, New Yorkers kept calling this block the Tombs, and kept calling that walkway the Bridge of Sighs, even generations after both names had stopped describing anything that actually existed.