“You know in the “Ten Commandments,” the way the water is when they part the sea? That’s how the water was coming down,” she recalled. “It was the river. The river was in here.”
Featherstone rode out the storm on a cot in her second-floor office after the power went out. The water receded and no one was harmed. But a year later, the Bayview Correctional Facility remains empty.
The 153 women — serving time for robberies, assaults and lesser crimes — were evacuated a few days before the storm to upstate prisons and never came back. The flooding destroyed boilers and damaged electrical equipment, causing $600,000 in damage. The state’s current budget called for the facility to close by the end of the fiscal year as a cost-saving measure, leaving the building in limbo.
The state has sold other shuttered prisons elsewhere to local governments that have turned them into business parks or to private buyers at auction. The Empire State Development agency is still assessing the best use for Bayview, but its location alone suggests it has more potential than the typical redevelopment stepchild.
Bayview abuts a condominium high-rise designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and topped by a penthouse unit that sold for nearly $20 million. Promotional material for the high-rise touts neighborhood features that are steps away — a slew of gourmet restaurants, the sprawling Chelsea Piers sports facility and the popular Highline elevated park — but makes no mention of the vertical prison that’s in plain view from the upper the floors.
In such a hot neighborhood, potential buyers would swarm if they knew the building could be torn down and replaced with more high-end residential development, said Jonathan Miller, president of real estate appraiser Miller Samuel Inc.
“The value there is in the land, or ‘the dirt’ as developers call it,” he said. “It’s all about the dirt.”
