The Tombs

Façade of Manhattan’s Halls of Justice, known as The Tombs. From Charles Sutton, The New York Tombs: Its Secrets and Its Mysteries, eds. James B. Mix and Samuel A. MacKeever (New York: United States Publishing Company, 1874), p. 78.

The English novelist Charles Dickens, who visited the prison in the early 1840s, described its architecture as a “dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama."

The Tombs is also the prison where Bartleby, the ghostly, enigmatic hero of Herman Melville's short story, spends his last days. Melville's narrator discovers his lifeless body in a courtyard there:

"The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.

"Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused, then went close up to him; stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping."