BRemember when they were going to turn the Booklyn House of Detention into a mall or a condos? That’s old news.

Now they’re talking about adding additional housing for 720 inmates and a new addition. More info is available from the Brooklyn Jail Stakeholders Group.

The Brooklyn HOD Community Stakeholders Group has obtained a copy of an RFP issued
by the NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC) at a pre-proposal
conference held at the Brooklyn
Detention Center
on March 28, 2008. The community was not notified of the RFP or the conference.

According to the RFP, the city intends to engage a firm by the end of July to
design and execute an expansion of the HOD. In what may prove an empty
exercise, the RFP repeats many of the requirements from a previous RFEI which
garnered only one proposal. The Department of Corrections dismissed that proposal,
Atlantic
Gateway, as unacceptable. The design period for this latest RFP extends 2
years, well beyond the terms of DOC Commissioner Horn or Mayor Bloomberg.

From the RFP (emphasis added):
"The purpose of this project is to create additional housing for 720 inmates in twelve
dormitories of sixty beds each; create space within the new addition and
within the first three floors of the existing structure providing programmatic
support and ancillary accommodations for the increased capacity; improve the
existing structure’s deteriorating facade; create continuous ground floor
retail space within the existing jail space along Atlantic Avenue and relocate
displaced jail functions elsewhere on site; and explore the prospect of
incorporating parking within the confines of the site."