This NYC building was a prison. Soon it will be affordable apartments with a view

As cities around the world look for ways to turn empty office buildings into much-needed housing, one conversion project in New York City has a very different beginning. Liberty Landing is a 100% affordable housing project that will be built out of the bones of a former women’s prison.

Located in what is now the Chelsea district of Manhattan between the Hudson River and the High Line, the Bayview Correctional Facility operated from 1971 until it was closed and abandoned after being destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. But it wasn’t just a prison. When the Art Deco building originally opened in 1931, it was a YMCA dormitory for beach sailors. “These were the days when there were sailors and merchant sailors and Manhattan was surrounded by boats and there were tall ships everywhere,” said Karen Hu of Camber Property Group, the developer of the conversion project. A narrow nine-story building with small dorm-like rooms lined up in a narrow hallway, the building provided cheap, temporary housing at a time when Chelsea was a very different kind of neighborhood.

Designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, the same architectural firm behind the Empire State Building, the building’s unique shape made it easy to convert into a women’s prison, and the smaller rooms were quickly converted into smaller cells. Transforming this building into anything else was a huge challenge, so the government-owned property has been making the list of things to do in New York for more than a decade. An old proposal to turn a prison into a house from Camber and architects CookFox Architects found a way to give the building a new lease of life.

“The size of those chambers is so small that the cells themselves can’t be recycled,” said CookFox colleague Bethany Borel. But the floor plate of the entire building is about 26 feet, which is a common depth for efficient housing. So the designers came up with a way to fill the original building with studios, and one and two bedroom apartments in the place where there were cells separated by a corridor. The new construction will rise from the front yard of the L-shaped building, providing another set of apartments. The corridor between the two rows of apartments will run parallel to what used to be the outer wall of the building. Existing window openings will be widened to accommodate the front doors of the apartment.

“Knowing that the pieces of the puzzle can fit together very well, it seems like a no-brainer that that’s the way we should proceed,” Borel said.

This approach also helped the conversion project retain as much of the original structure as possible. “We’ll be reimagining the interior while keeping the historic facade and floor slabs, keeping as much of the carbon footprint down as possible, but trying to be smart stewards of what we add to the building,” Borel said.

The prison-to-house conversion is still in the development phase, and construction won’t begin for another two years. But both Borel and Hu see affordable housing reform as a priority for this part of town.

“I grew up in New York on the Lower East Side in public housing, and I know how hard it is to live a stable life and raise a family in a really expensive environment. “But I am also a city planner by training, so I know that we need a diverse group of people in the city to keep it in a dynamic environment,” said Hu. “The idea of ​​having affordable housing with views of the Statue of Liberty all over Chelsea really suits me.”