FastCompany: This NYC Building Used to be a Prison. Soon It Will be Affordable Apartments with a View

“As cities around the world look for ways to convert empty office buildings into much-needed housing, one conversion project in New York City has a much different starting point. Liberty Landing is a 146-unit 100% affordable housing project that will be built from the bones of a former women’s prison.

Located in the now-posh Chelsea district of Manhattan between the Hudson River and the High Line, the Bayview Correctional Facility operated from 1971 until its closure and abandonment after being damaged 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 rooming house for seamen on shore leave. “This was back in the days when there were sailors and merchant marines and Manhattan was surrounded by wharves and there were tall ships everywhere,” says Karen Hu of Camber Property Group, the developer behind the conversion project. A narrow nine-story building with tiny dorm-like rooms lining a narrow hallway, the building provided affordable and temporary accommodations at a time when Chelsea was a much different kind of neighborhood.

Designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, the same architecture firm behind the Empire State Building, the building’s unique form made it an easy conversion into the women’s prison, with the tiny rooms being changed quickly into tiny cells. Turning the building into anything else was more of a challenge, and so the state-owned property has been foundering on New York’s redevelopment to-do list for more than a decade. A creative prison-to-housing conversion proposal from Camber and designers COOKFOX Architects found a way to give the building a new life.”

Read the full article here: This NYC Building Used to be a Prison. Soon It Will be Affordable Apartments with a View