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Former prison to be transformed into hub for women, engagement, and action

Womens Building

Just a few years ago, Bayview Correctional Facility in New York City was a notorious women’s prison with the highest reported rate of staff sexual violence of any prison in the United States. This month it was announced that, thanks to a partnership between the NoVo Foundation and the Goren Group, a woman-owned and -operated real estate development company, within a few years the infamous site is going to be transformed into The Women’s Building—not just a workspace for activists, but a “vertical neighborhood” that will provide a setting for women’s organizations to unite, focus, and thrive. In the words of NoVo co-president Jennifer Buffett, “The movement for girls and women will have a permanent address in New York City.”

One of the missions of the NoVo Foundation is to develop and promote innovative ideas to address issues of violence, security, learning, and economic prosperity affecting women and girls. NoVo executive director Pamela Shifman calls this project “a historic opportunity to reclaim a site of pain and confinement and transform it into a place that supports and celebrates women and our contributions to the world.”

Shifman is working with a diverse leadership team of women and girls, including formerly incarcerated women as well as leaders from groups such as the Women and Justice Project, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Equality Now, and A Call to Men, to envision what promises to be a unique space. Project leaders are also soliciting public input at a series of community events. Under consideration are office and meeting space for women’s organizations, child care spaces, places for quiet work and meditation, and rooms for healing. The space will allow groups and individuals to foster collaboration, build partnerships, create networks, and grow sustainable solutions.

"Bringing everybody together in one building, where they can be, they can live, they can breathe, they can transform—it’s huge,” said Yasmeen Hassan, global director of Equality Now.

The project realizes a decades-long dream of women’s rights leaders in the city. “The idea for a women’s building did not come from us,” said NoVo co-president Peter Buffett. “It’s been a dream of women’s rights leaders in this city since as early as the 1960s. They are the ones who envisioned a physical space that would allow women’s organizations to accomplish more together than they ever could alone.”

“When I came to NoVo in 2008,” Shifman told WMC, “I met with a lot of activists and asked them if they could do anything, what would they do to transform our world for the betterment of women and girls. Miriam Yeung, from the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, said immediately, ‘Create a women’s building—a physical home for the girls’ and women’s rights movement, here in New York.’” Her idea was echoed by many others.

Since that seed was planted, Shifman has spent several years in conversation with leaders of women’s groups about the challenges they face in New York City, including struggles to pay for space and utilities, to maintain services, and to connect and collaborate with peer organizations.

Shifman, together with Lela Goren, founder and president of the Goren Group and a longtime feminist activist, began to search for a building for

Real estate developer Lela Goren (center) with Lindsay Stravino (left) and Dolores Tanner, graduates of the Nontraditional Employment for Women training program. Photo by Katina Houvouras

Real estate developer Lela Goren (center) with Lindsay Stravino (left) and Dolores Tanner, graduates of the Nontraditional Employment for Women training program. Photo by Katina Houvouras

activists. When Bayview closed in 2012 and was made available for development, Shifman and Goren realized it would be a perfect space to facilitate social change. To take “a building that stood for confinement and pain and to transform it into a home for those working towards social justice for girls and women,” said Shifman, “was an opportunity we had to jump on.”

“New York has the greatest need,” said Gloria Steinem, “because it receives so many women leaders from other states, other countries, other continents, yet they have no central place to visit—this building will unite them.”

Originally built in 1931 as an eight-story YMCA catering to merchant sailors, in 1974 the edifice was converted to become the Bayview Correctional Facility, opened as the so-called war on drugs, which provided harsh, mandatory sentencing for mostly nonviolent offences, was picking up momentum in the United States.

Located in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, Bayview held as many as 300 women at a time over the years. By most accounts, the facility provided no problems for the residential community and kept inmates closer to their families than they would have been if incarcerated in larger prisons upstate. But a 2008-09 study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that 11.5 percent of women at Bayview reported staff sexual misconduct, with 10.8 percent citing coercion, the highest of any state facility surveyed on both counts. Bayview was also among only two state prisons and two jails where more than 5 percent of inmates reported use or threat of physical force to engage in sexual activity with staff.

In October 2012, days before Hurricane Sandy hit, Bayview transferred 153 women to upstate prisons. Once the storm passed and damages were assessed, its scheduled end-of-year closure was moved up. Many New Yorkers speculated about what extravagant development would seize the location. It was welcome news when NoVo and the Goren Group announced that Bayview would be turned into a multi-level, multi-purpose, national and global women’s center.

Organizers are committed to honoring the legacy of advocacy for incarcerated women. “Since the very inception of this project, and across all of our work,” said Shifman, “we have been deeply inspired by Sister Mary Nerney, a fierce advocate for incarcerated women and founder of STEPS to End Family Violence. Sister Nerney died in 2013, and as a way to honor her incredible commitment and vision, we’ve named the LLC associated with the new building in her name.”

This week, organizers of the project announced an architectural design competition to develop specific plans. Although the facade and some interior flourishes dating back to its time as a YMCA are likely to remain, the end result will be a radically transformed interior.

Shifman cites similar projects that have seen great success, such as The Women’s Building in San Francisco, founded in 1979. She extols the San Francisco Women’s Building as “a place that brings activists together” and adds that “it has been a really central space for movement building for the city.”

Through this reclamation, in many respects The Women’s Building in Chelsea, though most recently the site of so much abuse and pain, is coming full circle to its original function as a community center.  

“It’s so symbolic and important to take this building—the walls of which, if they could talk, would tell us of many injustices—and make it a building that symbolizes and houses freedom,” said Steinem.

 

The Women's Media Center is a grantee of the NoVo Foundation.


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