The jail deal is all locked up.
Department of Correction Commissioner Martin Horn told an angry crowd of Boerum Hill residents that the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic Avenue at Smith Street will definitely reopen, squelching any lingering hopes that the grim, 11-story Big House would be sold to a developer more in tune with the increasingly posh, residential neighborhood.
“The idea that there will not be a jail is not an option,” Horn said at public meeting held last Thursday at the historic Belarusian Church on Atlantic Avenue at Bond Street, a stone’s throw from the granite-faced jail (left).
The commissioner said that the city would “be crazy” to abandon the 50-year-old cells, which are connected to the borough’s courthouses via an underground tunnel.
“It is the right place for a jail,” he said.
Ever since the House of D closed in 2003, residents and local officials have pushed the city to make the lockdown permanent.
Instead, Horn announced in the spring that the jail would double in size, with hundreds of new cells, plus a 22,000-square-foot underground parking garage.
But the plan also called for new ground-floor retail and space for two residential, office or hotel towers on either side of the penal facility.
That nod to neighborhood character, however, did not go over as well as planned.
“The jail has been a bad neighbor for a long time, and we don’t want to see it reopen even bigger,” said Sandy Balboza, president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association.
