After 40 years, women’s groups find home
Print Edition
FINDING affordable real estate in New York City can take forever. Just ask Gloria Steinem and other feminist activists who searched for decades before finding a building to house women’s groups.
“We’ve been looking for a women’s building and hoping to find one for 40 years,” said Steinem, who co-founded Ms Magazine in 1972. “There was just nothing. New York is so expensive.”
Finally, renovation is about to begin to transform a former women’s prison in New York City into the Women’s Building, to offer women-focused groups everything from offices and shared meeting space to on-site child care and a rooftop garden.
It is projected to open in 2020, but the former prison — located in the Chelsea neighborhood, near art galleries and the High Line park — opens its doors to the public on Friday, ahead of its makeover, with an exhibit called “Women: New Portraits” by photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Everyone involved in the renovation of the former Bayview Correctional Facility will be women, from architects to builders and landscapers, organizers say.
With the election of Donald Trump as the next US president, the Women’s Building takes on added importance, Steinem said.
“It is a physical form of a social justice movement,” she said. “We are now the resistance.”
Giving special input into the Women’s Building project are women once incarcerated at Bayview, such as Sharon Richardson, who served 20 years in prison for murder and conspiracy stemming from a domestic violence case.
Watching the prison change is like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, she said.
“It’s going to undergo this whole transformation ... from what it used to be, which is a dark place, to now what it’s going to be, which is a beautiful place,” she said.
The metamorphosis will be no small feat. Built in 1931 to house sailors from nearby docks, the heavy-set brick building has raw concrete walls, small windows and worn linoleum floors. Rolls of razor concertina wire wrap some of its outer walls.
But it has great bones, as is said in real estate parlance, with intricate Art Deco details and tile inlays. It was designed by the same architects who designed the Empire State Building.
As a prison, Bayview had the highest rate of sexual misconduct by staff among the nation’s women’s prisons, according to the US Department of Justice.
More than one in 10 women said they had been sexually victimized by prison staff, according to a 2008-9 Department of Justice report.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
