Came to his soul as came the air
That heaved his bosom; hope, despair,
Were chastened by a holy faith!—
Meek in his life he feared not death.
Perhaps in the whole world there is not a building where all the horror, the wild poetry of sin and grief is so forcibly written out in black shadows and hard stone, as in the city prison of New York. A stranger passing that massive pile would unconsciously feel saddened, though entirely ignorant of its painful uses, for the very atmosphere fills him with a vague sensation of alarm. The Egyptian architecture, so heavy and imposing; the thick walls which no sunshine can penetrate, and against which cries of anguish might, unheard, exhaust themselves forever, chill the very heart. The ponderous columns, lost in a perspective of black shadows in the front entrance—piles of granite sweeping toward Broadway, and interlocking with the black prison that rises up, like a solid wall, gloomy, windowless, and penetrated only with loop-holes, like a fort which has nothing but misery to protect—fills the imagination with gloom.
The moment you come in sight of the building, your breath draws heavily; the atmosphere seems humid with tears—oppressive with sighs—a storm of human suffering appears gathering around. The air seems eddying with curses which have exhausted their sound against those walls; you feel as if sin, shame, and grief were palpable spirits, walking behind and around you; and all this is the more terrible, because the waves of life gather close up to the building, swelling against its walls on every side.
The prison sits like a monster, crouching in the very heart of a great city; the veins and arteries of social evil weave and coil close around it, like serpents born in the same foul atmosphere with itself. Placed on foundations lower than the graded walks, nestled in a dried up swamp that has exchanged the miasma of decayed nature for the miasma of human guilt; the neighborhood close at hand sunk, like this building, deep in the grade of human existence; is there on earth another spot so eloquent of suffering, so populous with sin?
"The Tombs," this name was given to the prison years ago, when its foundations were first sunk in the swampy moisture of the soil. Then you could see the vast structure sinking, day by day, into its murky foundations, and enveloped in clouds of palpable miasma. There the poor wretches huddled within its walls, died like herds of poisoned cattle; pine coffins were constantly passing in and out of those ponderous doors. Pauper death-carts might be seen every day lumbering up Centre street, on their road to Potter's Field. The man, innocent or guilty, who entered those walls, breathed his death warrant as he passed in.
This only continued for a season; it was not long before the tramp of human feet, and the weight of that ponderous mass of stone crushed the poisonous moisture from the earth, but the name which death had left still remained—a name deeply and solemnly significant of the place to all who deem moral evil and moral death as mournful as the physical suffering which had baptized it.
The main building, which fronts on Centre street, opens to a dusky and pillared vestibule, that leads to various rooms, occupied by the courts and officials connected with the prison. At the right, as you enter, is the police court, a spacious apartment, with deep casements. A raised platform, railed in from the people, upon which the magistrates sit, contains a desk or two, and beyond are several smaller rooms, used for private examinations.