Many NYU students know Greenwich Village as the heart of New York City’s LGBTQ+ community, but might not recognize the role of a local prison in its history. The Jefferson Market Library — NYU’s nearest branch of the New York Public Library — was formerly the site of a prison that confined women and LGBTQ+ people in poor conditions.
Founded in 1932, the Women’s House of Detention on 10 Greenwich Ave. held thousands of prisoners, many of whom were LGBTQ+ and working-class women of color, in addition to female activists arrested as political prisoners, including radical Catholic activist Dorothy Day and Black Panther Party members Angela Davis and Afeni Shakur. The prison officially closed its doors in 1971 due to increasing pressure by the surrounding community against its inhumane conditions, leading to the relocation of its incarcerated population to the then newly constructed Rikers Island facility.
Though the Jefferson Market Garden next to the library aims to honor the site’s history, it does not fully tell the story of the former prison’s history of violence — where LGBTQ+ women of color and trans masculine people were jailed for simply being LGBTQ+ or engaging in sex work.
Davis — a Marxist political activist known for her role in the prison abolition movement — was imprisoned at the House of Detention in 1970 following her alleged involvement in the armed seizure of a courthouse by Black Panther Party activists, in which four people died. The same year, Davis, already charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, was placed on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted fugitives list after an arrest warrant was issued.
Historian Hugh Ryan, who published a book about the prison in 2022, aims to educate readers on the LGBTQ+ history of the House of Detention, where many women and LGBTQ+ people were incarcerated not explicitly for their non-normative identity but nonetheless for deviating from gender norms. From wearing pants to walking outside alone at night, LGBTQ+ women could be simply arrested for not aligning with traditional gender norms.
“The majority of these women were arrested for prostitution and disorderly conduct, which usually meant some form of homelessness,” Ryan said in an interview with WSN.
These arrests served as a form of “forced feminization,” according to Ryan — a process by which LGBTQ+ women were charged with non-violent crimes, hiding the gender and race-based discrimination that fueled their convictions. Ryan also said that the inhumane living conditions at the House of Detention were largely overlooked in official prison reports, whose records shed light on the stories of its prisoners in a strictly punitive light.
“It was almost always overcrowded, as all prisons are. There would never have been a report saying when the water went out,” Ryan said. “The [prison’s] hospital had been ripped out to make dormitory-style rooms. Many of the inmates would complain about their teeth being ripped out by the dentist because the dentist didn’t pay any attention.”
Though Jefferson Market Library has limited materials on the history of the House of Detention, the prison’s legacy — which starkly exposes the role of the criminal legal system in the oppression of LGBTQ+ people — drives a broader critique of the prison system as a solution to crimes that are actually rooted in the conditions of racism, sexism and classism.
“I think the biggest thing we could do to honor [the prisoners] is to start to tear [the prison industrial complex] apart,” Ryan said. “We can start talking about its failures, such as a lack of hygiene and proper trials and conviction, and to start to imagine what is beyond that.”
Contact Pritheva Zakaria at [email protected].