In his new book The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan recovers the complex history of the building and the women who were either incarcerated or detained there, many of whom were queer women. Few who pass by the library’s distinctive, stocky clock tower know that it was originally a courthouse, or that the fenced in garden was once the site of a massive, art-deco designed women’s prison, known as the Women’s House of Detention. Bordered by a fence on three sides, the garden is adjacent to an impressively ornate 19th century brick building that is the Jefferson Market Public Library. At the cross streets of Sixth Avenue, West 10th Street, and Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village sits a small oasis of a garden.
