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Rikers Island Shutdown Plan Progresses With Construction Firms for New Manhattan Jail
The selection of Tutor Perini and O & G Industries to design and build the White Street lockup represents a final piece in the borough-jails puzzle.
This article originally appeared in The City.
By Reuven Blau
NEW YORK - The city’s ambitious plan to close Rikers Island took a major step forward after the Adams administration this month tapped two construction firms to build a new lockup in lower Manhattan — one of the final major outstanding contracts.
The city’s Department of Design and Construction intends to use Tutor Perini and O & G Industries to construct the new 1,040 bed jail on White Street in Chinatown, officials announced earlier this month.
“This is the last big piece when it comes to the jail side of construction,” Zachary Katznelson, executive director of the Independent Rikers Commission which lobbies for the closure of the jails by the East River, told THE CITY on Wednesday.
In May 2023, Tutor Perini was also selected to build the estimated $2.9 billion jail in Brooklyn.
Three years ago, City Hall initially tapped Gilbane Building Company and the Alberici Corporation to build the Manhattan location. But that proposed partnership fell apart last year over a dispute tied to insurance costs, according to multiple people familiar with those negotiations.
On Tuesday, Department of Design and Construction spokesperson Ian Michaels noted that the new proposed collaboration has not been finalized and a timeline for the completion of the jail remains undetermined.
He said it's still an “active procurement and negotiation” that will likely take several months. The proposed partnership must still be reviewed and approved by the city’s budget office, law department, and comptroller, Michaels added. Which means construction won’t begin for months, at least.
“We expect that process to wrap up in spring 2025, at which point the final cost and timeline will be public,” he said.
Bigger Problems
The announcement of the selected firms comes as jail officials in conjunction with the city’s largest public defender organization have been ordered to create a plan for a possible court-appointed receiver to take over some, or all, of the Correction Department.
The plan was ordered by Chief District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, in Manhattan federal court this September. She’s overseeing the so-called Nunez case, named after the lead plaintiff, that has dragged on since 2015 with little signs of improvement in jail conditions.
The Manhattan jail project is also moving forward despite Mayor Eric Adams saying in March that the plan to shut down Rikers the city originally committed to during the de Blasio administration may not be feasible because of increased costs and a spike in the jail population.
Adams at the time called for some type of “Plan B” but his administration has done nothing to offer any alternative while the NYPD steadily increases the number of people arrested.
Some 6,628 people were locked up inside various facilities on Rikers as of Tuesday, according to city records. By contrast, there were 5,400 people detained in city jails in January 2022.
The so-called borough based jails plan with new facilities in every borough except Staten Island will have space for around 4,500 detainees.
That includes 350 so-called secure hospital beds at NYC Health + Hospitals facilities Bellevue, Woodhull, and North Central Bronx hospitals.
The Bellevue unit is expected to be done by next year. But the city hasn’t selected contractors for the other two locations yet.
As for the Manhattan announcement, it also comes after the top Adams administration official overseeing the shutdown Rikers plan resigned in September. Lisa Zornberg, the mayor’s former chief counsel and legal advisor, stepped down days after Adams was criminally charged.
On Tuesday, mayoral spokesperson Liz Garcia said the shutdown plan has always been a coordinated interagency effort. Deputy mayors Meera Joshi and Chauncy Parker and a litany of city agencies are all working together to push the borough-based jail plan forward, Garcia added.
Jail reformers note the facilities will be closer than Rikers Island to courthouses, eliminating the grueling transportation process known to jail insiders as “bullpen therapy” in which detainees are shuttled to and from courts, starting as early as 3 a.m.
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A crane could be seen at the Manhattan jail site on Sept. 12, 2024. -
Department of Design and Construction reps oversee the demolition of the former Tombs jail complex. Nov. 13, 2024. -
The demolition work is happening next to Manhattan criminal court. Sept. 12, 2024. -
Protective screening as the demolition work continues. Sept. 12, 2024. -
Workers look over the site. Sept. 12, 2024. -
Excavation equipment at the former jail. Sept. 12, 2024. -
More work, and political decisions, loom ahead. Nov. 13, 2024.
Inmate advocates and public defenders contend the exhausting commute and long waits are used by prosecutors to pressure people into pleading guilty. The new facilities will also make it easier for people to visit their loved ones behind bars, supporters of the plan point out.
"The isolation and deprivation of Rikers is designed to feed a cycle of violence, not interrupt it,” Darren Mack, co-director of Freedom Agenda, told THE CITY. “If we want safer communities, we can't achieve that by sending people to fight for their lives on an out-of site, out-of-mind penal colony.”
The Freedom Agenda is the leading advocacy group pushing for the closure of Rikers.
Still, some neighborhood activists and community leaders, especially in Chinatown, have done everything possible to stop the plan.
They contend that the new jails will unduly burden their neighborhood and that the construction noise and rattling is making their homes and businesses unbearable.
In March 2023, the city briefly stopped demolition of the so-called “Tombs” jail facility after cracks appeared in the concrete wall of the Chung Pak low-income senior housing next door.
“In Asian culture, we are taught at a very young age to respect our elders,” state Assemblymember Grace Lee said at the time. “The impact the mega jail construction is having on the seniors at Chung Pak is an affront to our community – when you disrespect our elders, you disrespect Chinatown.”
DDC says it has since taken multiple steps to minimize the noise and disruption for residents and businesses in the area.
“Noise mitigation measures include use of mufflers on construction equipment and installing noise-absorbing materials such as curtains in areas to contain sound waves,” DDC’s Michaels said. “During the demolition, we lower debris to be carted away gently into trucks rather than just dropping debris in the trucks.”
The city also minimizes truck idling and the number of trucks staging at the site at any one time, he added.
Jan Lee, a co-founder of Neighbors United Below Canal, which brought a lawsuit challenging the review process for a new jail, questioned the selection of Tutor Perini.
“Can we be truly confident in the wake of a hollowed out City Hall that functions with skeleton leadership and corruption as its hallmark?” he asked.
Work Being Done
On Wednesday, at least four trucks were moving dirt and other debris from the site.
“It’s loud,” said Sam Xu, 58, a parking lot attendant across the street from the location. “From the morning until five or six o’clock. It drives me crazy.”
The city is also currently in the midst of shoring up the concrete wall for Chung Pak. A team of three DDC staffers were at the scene last week taking photos of the apparent guardrail attached to the wall.
Meanwhile, as the shutdown Rikers plan progresses, the need for more space has even become an issue on the island.
Last Tuesday, the city’s Board of Correction, the department’s oversight body, granted the Correction Department permission to put an additional 10 beds into housing units inside the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers. They are traditionally limited to 50 beds in those open housing spots.
The new, smaller lockups are required by law to be completed in 2027 when the city will be legally prevented from using Rikers Island as a jail.
But the jails in Queens and The Bronx aren't scheduled to be finished until 2031, with the Brooklyn site done in 2029, according to city records. No completion date is set for the Manhattan jail yet.
The size of each facility has gone up to deal with the added number of people in jail.
The initial plan announced by former mayor Bill de Blasio was for each of the borough facilities to have 886 beds. But that has gone up to 1,040 with an additional 350 secure hospital beds at three public hospitals, records show.
As for the cost, the estimate has increased from $8 billion to at least $15 billion, according to city budget records. The spike is largely due to an increase in building materials and labor, according to supporters of the plan.
In May 2024, DDC announced that it had selected Leon D. Dematties Construction Corp. to build the location in Queens. DDC chose Transformative Reform Group, a team headed by SLSCO Ltd. and Sciame Construction LLC, for The Bronx.
The Queens jail is expected to cost approximately $4 billion and The Bronx site $2.9 billion, according to city records.
The jail in Kew Gardens, right by the borough’s criminal courthouse, is more expensive because the facility is where women from citywide are scheduled to be housed. The women require their own separate area of the new jail.
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