Fury at Chinatown Jail: Locals Warn of Danger, City Set to Build

With local fury over the Chinatown jail still sky high even as the city prepares to build the controversial 16-story jail at 214 and 215 White St., a coalition of neighborhood groups issued a public letter warning Mayor Zohran Mamdani, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, “Close Rikers Czar” Dana Kaplan and Deputy Mayor Julia Kerson of the project’s potential construction perils.

“The buildings in the danger zone are our homes, our small businesses, the historic buildings along Baxter Street, and Chung Pak senior housing, where some of our most vulnerable neighbors live,” the letter asserts, urging the city to pause the project.

When complete, the new White Street slammer will replace The Tombs, formally the Manhattan Detention Center and, from 2001-2006, the Bernard B. Kerik Complex. It will also be Manhattan’s contribution to the much disputed “Borough-based Jail Program,” which was approved by the City Council in 2019 with the goal of closing Rikers Island by August 31, 2027. This goal will not come close to being achieved.

The ways in which this letter differs from the many past protests over what some have called the Chinatown “jailscraper” are subtle but significant. Likewise the 18 organizations that signed the letter, ranging from original jail opponents like Neighbors United Below Canal, to groups who’ve been accused of supporting the pokey and selling out the community in exchange for other, especially financial, considerations from the city.

In February 2024, Straus News reported on raucous protests against the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) over this and other issues. Now MOCA is a signatory to the protest letter, as is the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPAC), another organization anti-jail activists have accused of supporting the project to curry municipal favor.

The following month, when it appeared the dismantling of the old, 14-story Tombs caused cracks at the neighboring Chung Pak senior housing complex on Baxter Street, Council Member Christopher Marte, Assemblymember Grace Lee and State Sentator Brian Kavanagh were there, calling for a stop to the project. “Is the city prioritizing a $100 million plus demolition project, or is it for the community,” Marte asked pointedly. “Especially the seniors that live right next to it?”

“We have lost trust in this process. We have been having these conversations with the city for a very long time. We’ve been talking about what is necessary to accommodate the senior center next to the jail. And these conversations are not working,” said Lee. At that same time, many of the current protest letter’s 18 signatories were absent.

A Sinking Feeling

What changed? The immediate impetus for the new letter was a July 12, 2026, Daily News opinion piece by William Bialowsky, a senior principal of Bialosky New York Architects in SoHo. Bialowsky himself was compelled to write after reading a city-commissioned report about the White Street jail site produced by Langan, an engineering and environmental consulting firm headquartered at 21 Penn Plaza. In short—which the highly detailed 558-page is not—Bialowsky has serious concerns about the geology of White Street. In his own words:

“As an architect who has practiced in Lower Manhattan for more than 35 years and worked on many complex foundation projects, I was alarmed when I read the Langan report. I was more alarmed that it has received almost no public attention.”

“The Manhattan jail sits directly in the historic footprint of the Collect Pond, Lower Manhattan’s first fresh water source, later filled with whatever was at hand. Beneath the site lie layers of fill, organic pond mud (44.5% moisture content), soft clay, sand and gravel, with bedrock 100 feet down.”

“The original Tombs of 1838 was so structurally unstable,” Bialowsky continues, “that it was demolished. The 80 Centre St. office building one block south halted construction in 1928 when crews hit the swampy remnants of the Collect Pond, forcing a foundation redesign.”

“The Manhattan Detention of 1939, the building demolished to make way for the proposed jail, ran into the same trouble: contractor litigation, delays, and a foundation of hundreds of caissons to bedrock, with continuous pumping for 87 years. Three previous attempts. Three foundation crises. Now the city is preparing the fourth, deeper than any of the previous three.

Contemporary engineering has not resolved these old risks, and the report does not pretend otherwise.”

While the coalition letter leads with a reference to the Pfizer building beam buckling this past July, this was gilding the lily for those with short memories—or perhaps no memory at all— that “The jail site sits on the soft, waterlogged ground of the old Collect Pond.”

Zohran Inherits a Plan

The second key factor is that Zohran Mamdani is now in office, inheriting an idea launched by Mayor Bill De Blasio in 2017 and approved by the City Council in October 2019. At that time, all 10 Manhattan Council Members voted in favor of the “Borough Based Jail Plan.” A New York Times article preceding the vote was headlined: “4 Jails in 5 Boroughs: The $8.7 Billion Puzzle Over How to Close Rikers.” Today that price tag seems like a bargain, or fantasy, as the latest cost estimate is $16 billion and, if that number soars yet higher, few people will be surprised.

Of Manhattan’s ten Council Members— all of whom voted yes on the project— two remain in elected office: Comptroller Mark Levine and Assemblymember Keith Powers. Former District 8 Council Member Diana Ayala, who defeated Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs in the June Democratic primary, is near certain to join Powers in Albany in 2027. As for District 1 Council Member Margaret Chin, in whose district the new lockup would be built, she moved to California after she was term-limited out of office in 2021.

Chin’s successor Christopher Marte—who only narrowly lost his bid to unseat Chin in 2017—was a staunch opponent of the project since its announcement, and remains so. In 2019, Marte was a co-founder of the anti-Chinatown Jail Neighbors United Below Canal. While Marte and others favored a substantial renovation of the old Tombs, other opponents of the borough-based jail program split right and further left, the former feeling Rikers Island reforms were sufficient, the latter opposed to any construction that furthers the so-called “carceral state.”

For its part, the Mamdani administration seems unfazed by either past protests or the current letter about the Chinatown jail, with the city’s Department of Design and Construction and contractor Tutor Perini releasing a report that says, in essence, they have everything under control and a gleaming new Tombs with ground floor retail will open in 2032.

Meanwhile, work on Brooklyn’s 15-story borough-based jail—replacing the old Brooklyn House of Detention at 275 Atlantic Ave. in Boerum Hill—continues apace, on a site much easier to build upon, with a projected opening date of 2029.