Proposal to make NY's Sing Sing Block a Museum

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By New York Times

Published: 05/14/2001

Sing Sing prison's oldest cell block, completed in 1825, is 438 feet long, built of stone quarried by the very men who were to be imprisoned within and could hold more than 1,200 inmates in cells three and a half feet wide.
Now the cellblock is poised for a new life, 58 years after it stopped housing inmates and 26 years after it was gutted by fire. Under a proposal by residents and officials of Ossining, this embodiment of American social history is to be rehabilitated as the centerpiece of an $8 million exhibition called Sing Sing Historic Prison, on the perimeter of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, about 30 miles north of New York City.
There is nothing new about turning a prison into a museum. Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, Robben Island off Cape Town, the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and the Adelaide Gaol in Australia have been opened to visitors.
The Sing Sing plan, however, takes the idea one step further. 'To our knowledge, this would be the only museum in an active prison in the country, if not the world,' said Brian Fischer, the supervising superintendent of Sing Sing.
As to whether a museum and prison can coexist, Glenn S. Goord, the commissioner of New York correctional services, said he was 'very supportive' of the concept but would reserve judgment until more specific plans were drawn up. 'The devil is in the details,' he said, 'and I haven't seen the details.'
Without approved details, it is too early to say when the museum would open and where the money to build it would come from, though everyone involved seems to agree on at least one principle: that an impregnable line should be drawn between the 2,250 inmates and the 100,000 or so tourists who might arrive each year. Visitors would not even catch a glimpse of the medium-security dormitories, exercise yards and baseball diamond on the other side of the wall.
As envisioned by its promoters, Sing Sing Historic Prison would have a small museum in the former powerhouse, decommissioned about 30 years ago, where exhibitions would include a facsimile of the death chamber.
The museum layout would allow visitors to navigate around the re-creation of the death chamber if they do not want to see it.
From the museum, visitors would reach the old cellblock by a covered walkway along the tracks used by Amtrak and the Metro-North Railroad. Within the shell of the cellblock, a new structure would convey a sense of the original honeycomb density. Typical cells of the 1830's, 1860's and 1930's would be recreated. But most of the expanse would be untouched, allowing contemplation of its immensity from an elevated platform.

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