Judge halts overnight construction of Chinatown jail
/
A Manhattan judge ordered the city to halt overnight construction of the Chinatown borough-based jail after the city was sued over the new construction hours by a local organization and several residents. Photo via DDC
By Jacob Kaye
A judge this week ordered the city to temporarily halt overnight construction of its borough-based jail in Chinatown, potentially delaying the jail’s completion and the city’s plan to close Rikers Island, which is already running years behind schedule.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Kathy King sided with a local organization and a number of elderly Chinatown residents who said overnight construction of the planned 16-story “jailscraper” should be put on pause as their lawsuit against the city plays out in court.
Community group Welcome to Chinatown and several locals sued the city over the change in construction hours last week, claiming the city didn’t properly include the new hours in its environmental review of the project.
Ahead of a Dec. 1 hearing on the case, King ordered the city to stop work on the jail overnight. The new hours – which included a 7 a.m. to midnight shift during weekdays, a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift on Saturdays and allowed for deliveries between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. – were introduced by the city on Oct. 12 as a way to speed up construction of the jail, which was already on pace to be the last of the four borough-based facilities to be completed.
City officials said the new schedule would allow the city to finish a significant portion of the Manhattan jail by 2032, as opposed to its original completion date of 2034.
A spokesperson for the city’s Law Department said the city was “disappointed that after hours work at the site has been temporarily halted,” adding that city attorneys were “considering next steps.”
Despite regularly committing to closing Rikers Island, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has yet to put forth a public, comprehensive plan to do so. City law currently requires the city to shutter the dangerous jail complex where over 100 people have died over the past decade by August 2027, a deadline Mamdani and other officials have said will be impossible to meet, in large part because the borough-based jails won’t be ready by then.
The plan to close Rikers and the effort to build the jails – which together will cost taxpayers $16 billion – slowed significantly under former Mayor Eric Adams, who seemed increasingly less supportive of the plan as his four years in office progressed.
Since taking office, Mamdani has attempted to get the plan back on track by appointing a “close Rikers czar,” restarting land transfers involving unused jail facilities between the Department of Correction and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and opening a hospital unit for detainees with serious medical needs while ordering work to begin on several others.
"The Mamdani administration is fully committed to meeting our legal and moral obligation of closing Rikers Island and transitioning to a safer, more humane borough-based jail system as quickly as possible,” Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for the mayor, said in a statement. “We will have more to share soon."
The new construction hours at the Chinatown jail were the latest effort from the Mamdani administration to push the Rikers closure plan along.
Governor Kathy Hochul recently implemented a moratorium on the creation of new AI data centers in New York. A Queens lawmaker thinks she should do the same with battery storage sites. File photo by Mike Groll/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
But with overnight construction expected to run for the next 6 years and 7 months, the plaintiffs behind the lawsuit said the city needed to do more to show that nearby residents wouldn’t be adversely affected by it.
“No environmental review was conducted by the city to consider, let alone quantify, the potential environmental impacts arising from this new construction schedule,” the lawsuit read. Since there has been no analysis, quantification, or disclosure of the actual potential environmental impacts arising from this more than doubling of intensity of construction activities over the next 6 years and almost 8 months straight, the city cannot reasonably assert that it knows whether these measures will actually be effective, or even partially effective, in providing any of the protection that they purport to provide.”
Some claimed the first two weeks of the new schedule were already impacting their quality of life.
Betty Lee, a 78-year-old who lives with her 82-year-old husband across the street from the construction site, said many of the disruptions they have experienced during the daytime hours over the past two years have bled into what used to be their only hours of peace.
“So now, there is bright lighting, essentially creating daylight conditions, and there is constant loud noise from two drills and other heavy excavation machinery placed directly across from our window,” Lee, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a court filing. “Even with the windows closed and our shades drawn, we have been unable to rest and sleep.”
The city first presented the plan for extended construction hours in early October, during a community working group meeting. To mitigate the effects of the construction, the city said it would wrap the site’s perimeter fence in “noise-attenuating blankets,” put additional noise barriers near drilling equipment, and regularly measure noise levels.
The city will likely be unable to close Rikers Island until a significant portion of the borough-based jails are completed.
The Brooklyn jail is expected to open in 2029, while both the Queens and Bronx facilities are expected to be completed by 2031. The Manhattan jail will open in 2032 if after-hours construction work is allowed to continue, according to the city.
With the city unable to meet the 2027 closure deadline, the City Council is currently drafting a bill to extend the deadline and potentially create a new one, the Eagle exclusively reported in September.
The Mamdani administration was required by law to produce a public report on its plan to close Rikers by May 2026. It missed the deadline and has yet to present the report.
The mayor’s office did not respond to questions about the status of the report on Tuesday.
