A Stylistic Joke As A Name

There’s a large, somewhat ominous, vaguely art deco building in lower Manhattan commonly called the Tombs. The main portion of it is a courthouse with a lot of court-related office space, the northern wing – see below – is a short-term prison, mostly used to hold people awaiting trial. The official name of the southern court-related portion is the New York City Criminal Courts Building; the northern wing is currently being rebuilt for the second time since the building was constructed in 1941 and is various known as the Manhattan House of Detention or the Manhattan Detention Complex. If we’re honest, “the Tombs” is a much more evocative name than any of the formal names that the building and its predecessors have had. Bad enough to be in jail or on trial; to be held in “The Tombs” seems worse.

Before the current building, the same functions were served by the 1902 City Prison and the 1894 Manhattan Criminal Courts building, one block to the west, on the other side of Centre Street. The City Prison was known as the Tombs and, presumably, bequeathed the name to the current structure. Both were serious but undistinguished heavy masonry buildings, as expected based on their dates of construction. The most interesting thing about them was the bridge connecting them at the third floor level, crossing above Franklin Street, referred to as the Bridge of Sighs. Wikipedia counts fifteen bridges named the Bridge of Sighs, starting with the 1600 original in Venice; at least four are related to courts or prisons. In short, it’s an old joke and not really funny anymore, assuming it ever was.

The name started with the predecessor to the late-1800s buildings, on the same site. The 1838 Halls of Justice and Prison was the first to be nicknamed The Tombs and there are two good reasons for that name to have stuck.

The first, boring reason is that the building was constructed, in part, on landfill in what had formerly been the Collect Pond. Given that the pond was fed by springs and the building had masonry foundations, it was reported to be damp on the inside at all times, every day. The cells were also quite small, and lit to the dismal standard of the day, and you get a sense of how unpleasant it must have been. The second, not-boring reason is that it was built during a brief but intense craze for Egyptian-themed architecture. Here it is in an 1885 photo, with the court wing in the front and the edge of the prison wing seen on the far left:

Fake ancient Egyptian architecture…Tombs…get it? GET IT?