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By: Benyamin Davidsons
Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has signed contracts totaling close to $7 billion to build two new borough-based jail facilities.
As reported by Crain’s NY, the borough-based jails to be erected in Queens and the Bronx are to serve as replacements for the ailing Rikers Island, which will be permanently shuttered. The contracts inked were with two New York-based design-build teams. The City’s Department of Design and Construction awarded a $2.9 billion contract to the Sweet Group (which is part of the limited liability company Transformative Reform Group) to build the Bronx facility. It granted another $3.9 billion contract to Leon D. DeMatteis Construction Corp, to build the Queens facility. The total for the contracts came to $6.8 billion, as per a notice which appeared in the city register on Monday.
The planned Bronx jail will be built at 745 E. 141st St. in Mott Haven on the site of the former Lincoln Hospital and an NYPD tow pound.
The jail is slated to span 777,150-square-feet. The Sweet Group, located at 5 Hanover Square in the Financial District, has previous experience working with the city on building out numerous Covid-19 vaccination units across NYC’s five boroughs. The firm is also responsible for erecting the 28-story WeWork building at 10 Wall St. and the Queens Public Library Mitchell Linden Technology Annex Branch expansion.
Per Crain’s, the Queens jail project is planned at 126-02 82nd Ave. in Kew Gardens, on the site of the former Queens Detention Complex.
The 764,350-square-foot facility is to be erected by the Elmont, Nassau County, company run by the DeMatteis family. The Long Island-based firm is also currently working on the project to construct a 310,274-square-foot Success Academy Charter Schools campus in the Bronx, slated for completion in 2026.
The contracts for the Bronx and Queens facilities are not final and are still subject to a public hearing to take place May 16, as per the city’s notice. Construction at both sites is slated to begin in August, said a spokesman for the Department of Design and Construction.
The Sweet Group and Leon D. DeMatteis Construction Corp. did not provide comment.
In all, four new facilities are planned to replace Rikers Island. The other two are planned for Brooklyn and Manhattan. Last year, the city inked a $2.9 billion contract with Los Angeles-based firm Tutor Perini to erect the Brooklyn jail, Crain’s reported. A contract for the Manhattan facility has yet to be awarded. Together the four jails will cost $15.5 billion to build. Each of the four facilities will hold 1,040 beds, said Jeffrey Margolies, a spokesman for the Department of Design and Construction. The Queens site will be the only jail for women, with 590 beds to be provided for female detainees from all five boroughs. In total, the four jails will have capacity to detain 4,160 persons.
Rikers jail complex, situated in the middle of the East River, currently has a much larger capacity—and can detain 6,000 prisoners.
In 2017 former-Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to close the notorious Rikers Island, and set up a roadmap to replacing the complex with a smaller “network of modern, safe and humane facilities”. The legally mandated August 2027 deadline to shutter Rikers, however, seems untenable. In March, Jacques Jiha, the city’s budget director, told the City Council that deadline is “not going to happen.”
