City Shrinks Proposed Kew Gardens Jail Ahead Of Council Vote

KEW GARDENS, QUEENS — City officials have negotiated down the size of a new jail proposed for Kew Gardens ahead of the City Council's binding vote Thursday on the plan, which calls for new detention centers on every borough but Staten Island by 2026.

The Kew Gardens jail, originally designed as a 27-story building, would now stand 19 stories high, the City Council announced Tuesday. That translates into a height reduction of 75 feet, from 270 to 195 feet.

Under the new proposal, the jail would have a capacity of 886 detainees, according to Michael Cohen, a spokesperson for City Council Member Karen Koslowitz.

Original plans had the jail's capacity at 1,437 beds, a number that was lowered to 1,150 in June.

But the Kew Gardens jail would be the largest of the four new city jails in terms of square footage, according to a spokesperson for the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice.

The facility would be 1,156,900 square feet, compared to less than a million square feet for the three other jails, the spokesperson, Alacia Lauer, wrote in an email.

Koslowitz, who represents the neighborhood where the Queens jail would rise, has long pressed city officials to reduce the size of the Kew Gardens jail.

"The last several months I have been adamant that the proposed size of the borough based jail in Kew Gardens needed to be significantly reduced," Koslowitz said in a statement Tuesday. "As a result of difficult negotiations with the Administration, I am pleased to have reduced the height of the facility by close to 100 feet, and cut the number of beds that the facility will house nearly in half."

Koslowitz previously succeeded in getting Mayor Bill de Blasio's office to nix plans for an infirmary in the Kew Gardens jail that would serve all four new detention centers.

She has also pushed City Hall to agree to a list of community benefits, including eight new cops assigned to the NYPD's 102nd Precinct in Kew Gardens, in return for the neighborhood shouldering the "burden" of a new jail, as de Blasio has privately called it.

All four new jails would be smaller than originally planned under the newly negotiated proposal announced Tuesday, according to a City Council press release.

The jails in Queens and the Bronx would be smallest, at 195 feet. The Brooklyn and Manhattan jails would stand at 295 feet, or 29 stories.

Officials said the reductions were made possible by state criminal justice reforms that have cut the city's jail population, design changes and the creation of 250 new hospital beds to house individuals diagnosed with serious mental illnesses.