Housewarming at the Big House
Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 07:54PM 
Brooklyn House of Detention, viewed from Atlantic Ave. (Image courtesy of Urban Omnibus)
I've got a new piece up on Urban Omnibus about the controversy surrounding the reopening of a jail a few blocks from my apartment in Brooklyn. Here's part of it:
I recently spent my Saturday in jail with a few hundred of my neighbors. The jail in question was the Brooklyn Detention Complex, formerly the Brooklyn House of Detention, or “House of D,” a ten-story gray hulk that sits on the north side of Atlantic Avenue at Boerum Place. The building, which first opened in 1957, has no good angles — it is ugly from every side — but the grand view from its caged, rooftop exercise area encompasses Brooklyn’s priciest neighborhoods: Cobble Hill to the southwest, Brooklyn Heights to the west, and Boerum Hill to the south and immediate north, east and west. In both function and architecture, it seems like an incongruous holdover from an earlier, pre-gentrification era.
Which explains why we were there. Later this month, the jail is set to fill its 759 beds for the first time since the facility was shuttered for renovations in 2003. In advance of the re-opening, the Department of Corrections (DOC) realizes it is confronting a much-changed Boerum Hill; the open house is an attempt to placate the handwringers as part of a coordinated charm offensive. As Warden Walter Nin told The New York Times during a press tour the day before the public open house, “We are fully committed to being good neighbors.”