Lincoln Correctional Facility (New York City, New York)

 condominiums, interesting place, Georgian (architecture)

8-story Neo-Renaissance residential building completed in 1914 as the headquarters for the Young Women's Hebrew Association. Designed by Jallade & Abramson, it was later sold to the U.S. Army in 1942 and was temporarily used for local soldiers during World War II. In 1948 it was renovated and became the New Lincoln School, adding the Northside Center for Child Development in 1954, and is mostly widely known as the Lincoln Correctional Facility, a minimum-security men's prison that overlooked Central Park for decades from 1976 until its closure in 2020.

The facade is clad in light-brown brick with a high, white-painted stone water table. The main entrance is at the center, with a short set of steps and recessed a metal-and-glass door and sidelights below a large transom set in a stone molding that is flanked by thin stone pilasters with console brackets carrying a triangular pediment with a shield. The ground floor has a narrow window on either side, followed by a wider single-window. The ends of the ground floor have three single-windows and recessed metal service doors.

The upper floors have five single-windows in the middle, and the ends have a paired-window bay flanked by a single-window on either side. The ground-floor windows have brick surrounds, those on the 2nd floor have iron surrounds, and those on the 3rd floor have patterned tan terra-cotta surrounds; the 3rd floor is set off by a terra-cotta band course with an egg-and-dart molding. Another band course runs above the windows at the ends of the facade, and the end sections are framed by quoins from the 4th-7th floors. The outer quoins are regular brick, while the inner ones are tan terra-cotta in alternating sizes. The top floor is set off by a string course and has larger round-arched windows in the middle, with decorated terra-cotta surrounds and floral ornament below them. Vertical terra-cotta beams separate the end sections from the middle, and the end-section windows are topped by garlanded shields. The roof line is marked by a bracketed, projecting, tan terra-cotta cornice.

When it was used as a jail, the windows were replaced by black metal panels, and the rooftop yard was enclosed by a cage with a dark-red iron framework. In 2020, the building was to be sold and redeveloped as residential units.

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www.lisaltzman.com/lincoln-correctional