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Coordinates: 40°42′59″N, 74°00′06″W

Picture postcard from 1895

"The Tombs" is the colloquial name for a jail in lower Manhattan at 125 White Street, as well as the popular name of a series of downtown jails.^[1] The nickname has been used for several structures dating from the early-mid 19th Century.

The first complex to bear the nickname was built in 1839, designed by John Haviland after an engraving by an obsure American artist of an ancient Egyptian mausoleum. It occupied the block in Lower Manhattan surrounded by Centre, Franklin, Elm (today's Lafayette), and Leonard Streets, and initially accommodated about 300 prisoners.

This block had been created in 1811 by the filling-in of the Collect Pond, a small lake that had been an important fresh water source for colonial New York City. Industrialization and population density by the late 1700s resulted in the severe pollution of the Collect, and it was condemned, drained and filled in. The landfill job was not a thorough one (and perhaps could not have been, as the Collect was fed by very deep aquifers and surrounded by bogs), and swampy, foul-smelling conditions had already led to the formation of a poor, hardscrabble neighborhood by the time construction of the prison started in 1838. The enormous, heavy masonry of Haviland's building was built atop caissons of gigantic lashed hemlock tree trunks in a bid for stability, but the entire structure began to sink soon after it was opened. It was this watery foundation along with the lightless stolidity of the building which would be primarily responsible for its reputation as an egregious, unsanitary hellhole in the decades to come.

As it also housed the city's courts, police and detention facilities of the day, The Tombs' more formal title was The New York Halls of Justice and House of Detention. Some regarded it as a notable example of Egyptian Revival architecture in the U.S., but opinion varied greatly on its actual merit as an exemplar. "What is this dismal fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter's palace in a melodrama?", asked Charles Dickens in his American Notes of 1842.

The prison was well known for its corruption and went through numerous scandals and successful prison escapes throughout its early history and, by 1850, many were calling for its destruction.

By the early 1900s, reforms began to be made as the first prison school for younger inmates in an American adult correction facility was established by the Public Schools Association in 1900.

The original building was replaced in 1902, connected by a "Bridge of Sighs" with the Criminal Courts Building on the Franklin Street side. That building was replaced in 1941 by one at 125 White Street, officially named the Manhattan House of Detention, though still popularly referred to as "The Tombs."

Part of the Tombs was eventually closed in 1974 due to security and health reasons. Shortly thereafter, it too was pulled down and replaced with another building. The current jail comprises two buildings connected by a pedestrian bridge--a 381 bed tower that is the remaining part of the 1941 building at 100 Centre Street, and a 500-bed tower north of it, opened in 1990.^[1]

The current Tombs prison was named The Bernard B. Kerik Complex in December of 2001 at the direction of Mayor Rudolph Guiliani; Kerik had been a well-regarded corrections commissioner from 1998-2000 before becoming police chief. After Kerik's 2006 plea bargain admitting to two misdemeanor ethics violations dating from his tenure as a city employee, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered his name removed.^[1]

• The Tombs is the setting for the endings of two works by Herman Melville: Pierre: or, The Ambiguities and Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby, apparently through willful starvation, dies on the grassy ground of an open yard in the prison, prompting his former employer to famously exclaim, "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!".
• The Tombs also provides the setting in the 1937 pulp fiction story "Dictator of the Damned." The Spider stages a daring raid to help clear an innocent man.
• Jim Carroll mentions in his song "People Who Died" that his friend Bobby committed suicide by hanging in the Tombs.^[2]
• TV drama Law & Order regularly makes references to The Tombs.
• Harlan Ellison penned an autobiographical novel — Memos from Purgatory — concerning his brief incarceration in The Tombs for his arrest stemming from the possession of a firearm that he had used as a prop while lecturing.^[3]

• deFord, Miriam Allen (1962). Stone Walls: Prisons from Fetters to Furloughs. Philadelphia: Chilton. OCLC 378834. 
• Johnson, James A. (2000). Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252025570. OCLC 42434965. 
• Sifakis, Carl (2003). The Encyclopedia of American Prisons. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 9780816045112. OCLC 49225908. 

• Berger, Meyer [1942] (1983). "The Tombs", The Eight Million: Journal of a New York Correspondent, Columbia University Press Morningside ed., New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 23–35.. ISBN 9780231057103. OCLC 9066227. 
• New York Correction History Society timeline (includes photo)
• An early engraving by John Poppel.
• John DePol etching of a later building, 1942
• Painting of 1842 fire at The Tombs.
• "Irish in New York" site, Census of prisoners in 1860
• --News story.