In the Bronx, New Life for an Old Prison

The seven-story, faded-brick building — across from Crotona Park in the Claremont section of the Bronx — has no distinct personality, which may help explain why it has been reincarnated so many times over the past century.

It began life in 1907 as an Episcopal church house. By the 1920s, the area was heavily Jewish, and the building became a Young Men’s Hebrew Association, with a synagogue on the ground floor. In the 1950s, it was a nursing home. Later it operated as a drug treatment center.

Each time, the building’s new use tracked the shifting demographics and needs of New York City.

Today it sits vacant. If local residents think of it at all, they probably remember it not as a house of worship, but for its service of a different sort of penitent: For nearly four decades, it was the Fulton Correctional Facility, a minimum-security prison that housed up to 900 inmates on work release.

The state closed the prison four years ago, one of 13 facilities the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo has shut down in the wake of a major drop in the state’s inmate population, from nearly 73,000 in 1999 to 54,000 in 2012.

But last week the building at  Fulton began its latest transformation, this time into a community re-entry center that will provide temporary housing and job training to New Yorkers returning from prison.

On Jan. 28, the city signed over the building’s deed to the Osborne Association, an 82-year-old prison reform group that will operate the center after extensive renovations, thanks mainly to a $6 million grant from a state fund established for communities where prisons have closed.

Elizabeth Gaynes, Osborne’s executive director, has been the driving force behind the re-entry center. At a ceremonial handover of the building’s keys on Thursday, she thanked state officials for the opportunity. New York’s corrections department, Ms. Gaynes said, has “generally behaved like proud parents who are marrying off their child to someone of a different religion.”

It will take some work to make Fulton look like a place that people aren’t forced at gunpoint to live in. Gray cinderblock walls, low ceilings and dim, scuffed hallways ring the floors. The cells — some no more than eight feet square — are bare but for barred, dirt-caked windows and metal toilets bolted to the walls.

As the country’s 40-year incarceration boom has leveled off, states have struggled with what to do with abandoned prisons. Some have been converted into hotels, others into homeless shelters, a cemetery, a summer camp and a movie studio. But Fulton is the first to become a multipurpose re-entry center, Ms. Gaynes said.

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