The vision of a museum inside the walls of New York state”™s most famous prison is one step closer to being a reality.
A $250,000 grant has been awarded by the Empire State Development Corp. and the Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council to Historic Hudson River Towns, which wants to build a museum focusing on the history of Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a still-operational maximum security prison in the village of Ossining. The museum would be inside the prison”™s walls.
- A historical photo of the prison. Photo courtesy Historic Hudson River Towns
The grant money will be used by Historic Hudson River Towns, a nonprofit consortium of riverfront communities, to update feasibility and marketing studies on the proposed museum which local officials expect to be a major tourist attraction.
“We”™re excited, we think the museum would be a great attraction for the city, the region, and the county,” said Jerry Faiella, the executive director of Historic Hudson, who thinks that 200,000 or more people could visit the museum annually.
“We”™ve got great brand recognition,” Faiella said, with a hint of a laugh, noting that a lot of slang terms for incarceration came from Sing Sing. “We”™ve got ”˜up the river,”™ ”˜the big house,”™ there”™s several of them.”
The history of the prison spans nearly 200 years. Bought by New York state in 1825 for $20,100, the 135-acre site has been a working prison since the first 100 inmates arrived from Auburn Prison in May of that year. When the prisoners arrived, there was no prison to speak of ”” they built the walls of their own confinement after quarrying the building stones on site.
With 800 cells on four tiers, the original prison took nearly three years to build. When it was finished, Sing Sing”™s prisoners continued to quarry marble. Stone quarried at Sing Sing was used to construct, among other buildings, the New York State Capitol in Albany and Grace Church in Manhattan.
The original cellblock was closed in 1940 and in 1943 the bars were stripped from the building and donated to the war effort. A 1984 fire destroyed the roof, leaving the cellblock in its current state.
Over the years, Sing Sing has housed some of New York”™s most notorious prisoners, including Albert Fish, Ruth Brown Snyder, Gary Evans and Eddie Lee Mays, all convicted of murder. David Berkowitz did time at Sing Sing immediately following his sentencing for the “Son of Sam” murders.
But Sing Sing is perhaps best known as the home of “Old Sparky,” the electric chair that was used in the execution of 614 convicts in the prison”™s death house. Among those whose death sentences were carried out at the prison were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the spies who transmitted secret atomic bomb information to the Soviet Union.
Building the museum inside the prison isn”™t a new idea.
“I think it started back in the 14th century,” former Ossining Mayor Bill Hanauer told the Business Journal when the grant application was announced last summer. Hanauer has been involved in the effort since 2005. “(Former Westchester County Executive) Andy Spano reignited the effort, which goes back a long way, well into the 1990s, I believe.”
Currently, there is a small exhibit about the history of Sing Sing at the Joseph G. Caputo Community Center at 95 Broadway in Ossining.
