According to the Daily News, renovations on two city jails–the East River jail barge and Rikers Island–may force the City to re-open the dormant Atlantic Avenue jail by 2007. In the understatement of the year, Downtown Brooklyn Council head Michael Burke was quoted as saying, “Having a jail smack in the middle of all this new development is not a good thing.” Halstead’s director of sales, Bill Ross, estimates that this would knock 25% off property values in the buildings that flank the site. How about further afield? What will the affect be on Boerum Hill brownstones? Other ramifications?
Brooklyn Jail May Re-open for Biz [NY Daily News]


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply

  1. who cares, open the prison. if you bought into any of those condos, you are lame as hell. you are serving a sentence much like the prisoners–you belong to life alongside them. sorry to hear that some encarcerated folks nearby might ruin your brooklyn yuppie fantasy…good grief. also, stay the fuck out of Sahadi’s, you have extremely annoying customer service expectations and are ruining it for everyone else.

  2. Does anyone have a collection of links to the City’s re-zoning plans for downtown Brooklyn? I’d like to believe that re-opening the jail would interfere with those plans, but I doubt it. As I recall, the bulk of the commercially oriented zoning trends toward the Flatbush Ave corridor, but I could be wrong.

    Anyway, I think that the city had done a pretty good job aesthetically on the jail’s face lift at street level. (So far, at least — there’s always a chance for a massive screw-up.) It’s still an eyesore at the skyline level.

  3. Bloomberg is really behind making downtown Brooklyn a business center — and recently passed the huge rezoning of the area — that competes with cities like Atlanta and Dallas. I doubt they’d ruin that initiative with the re-opening of the detention center.

  4. This seems like pure speculation… and is probably purely in response to all the comments made last month by Markowitz and many other Brooklyn officials to close it down altogether… they’ve been pretty open about their feelings on the topic

  5. I think the condo speculations was just that. We all could see how the ciyt was still fixing up the facade at street level, and has even gone so far as to remove some of the portables on State behind the detention house.

    On the plus side, it may only be temporary while parts of Rikers are renovated — although my guess is that temporary in this contxt could mean 10 years.