City files to demolish the Tombs, Manhattan’s notorious pretrial jail

The City of New York, through the Department of Design and Construction, filed a plan to demolish a 19-story building within the Manhattan Detention Complex, known as the Tombs, at 125 White Street in the Civic Center neighborhood near City Hall in Lower Manhattan. The plan was filed on approximately September 27.

The job is described as: Full demolition of nineteen-story building, using hand held and mechanical means to assist.

This is the third building on the detention center complex for which demolition plans have been filed. The overall parcel has frontage of 451 feet and is 224 feet deep with a total lot size of 108,950 square feet. The lot is irregular. The zoning is C6-4 which allows for up to 10 times floor area ratio (FAR) for commercial and up to 10 times FAR for residential with inclusionary housing. The city-designated market value for the property in 2022 is $204 million.

The specialty building in Civic Center has 1,106,962 square feet of built space according to PincusCo analysis of city data. The property is owned by City of New York.

According to city public data, the property has received one DOB violation, $1,250 in ECB penalties, and $1,275 in OATH penalties in the last year.

Over the past five years, there have been 31 NYC Department of Buildings permit applications filed for this parcel valued at more than $20,000. There were 28 renovation/alteration projects (A2) applied for with a total estimated value of $7.5 million. There have been three demolition projects filed over the past four months.

The PincusCo database currently indicates that City Of New York owned at least 2,814 commercial properties in New York City with 151,682,987 square feet and a city-determined market value of $31.5 billion. (Market value is typically about 50% of actual value.) Within the portfolio, the bulk, or 91 percent of the 151,682,987 square feet of built space are specialty properties, with office properties next occupying 4 percent of the space. The bulk, or 39 percent of the built space, is in Brooklyn, with Bronx next at 23 percent of the space.

PincusCo has not identified any commercial real estate items of interest within a 400-foot radius of Mn detention complex north skywy that occurred over the past 24 months.

Direct link to the property’s ACRIS page and link to DOB NOW portal.