Dickens may fairly be said to have begun his sight-seeing in America by going to jail. He commenced with those in Boston, and wherever else he found a prison he had a look at it. The interest he took in penal reform, which rendered him familiar with nearly every gaol in England, did not desert him when he made his first voyage across the Atlantic. In the “American Notes,” among a number of minor and comparatively unimportant observations, most of which are, in fact, long out of date, and lost in the changed conditions of jail construction, discipline and government, there are two descriptions, which retain their interest. The first in order of occurrence in the book, relates to a prison as famous throughout America as Newgate is in Great Britain, and which, indeed, is the closest approach we have to the gloomy criminal cage of London. You may find it in a description of a walk about New York in Chapter 6:

“What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama? A famous prison called the Tombs. Shall we go in?

“So. A long, narrow and lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and communicating by stairs. Between the two sides of each gallery, and in its center, a bridge for the greater convenience of crossing. On each of these bridges sits a man, dozing or reading, or talking to an idle companion. On each tier are two opposite rows of small iron doors. They look like furnace doors, but are cold and black, as though the fires within had all gone out. Some two or three are open, and women with drooping heads bent down are talking to the inmates. The whole is lighted by a skylight, but it is fast closed; and from the roof there dangle, limp and drooping, two useless windsails.

“A man with keys appears to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and in his way civil and obliging.

“‘Are those black doors the cells?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Are they all full?’

“‘Well, they’re pretty nigh full, and that’s a fact and no two ways about it.’

“‘Those at the bottom are unwholesome, surely.’

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“‘Why, we do only put colored people in ’em. That’s the truth.’

“‘When do the prisoners take exercise?’

“‘Well, they do without it pretty much.’

“‘Do they never walk in the yard?’

“‘Considerable seldom.’

“‘Sometimes, I suppose?’

“‘Well, it’s rare they do. They keep pretty bright without it.’

“‘But suppose a man were here for a twelve-month? I know this is only a prison for criminals who are charged with some grave offenses, while they are awaiting trial, or are under remand, but the law affords criminals many means of delay. What with motions for new trials, arrest of judgment and what not, a prisoner might be here for twelve months, I take it, might he not?’

“‘Well, I guess he might.’

“‘Do you mean to say that in all that time he would never come out at that little iron door for exercise?’

“‘He might walk some, perhaps—not much.’

“‘Will you open one of the doors?’

“‘All, if you like.’

“The fastenings jar and rattle, and one of the doors turns slowly on its hinges. Let us look in. A small, bare cell, into which the light enters through a high chink in the wall. There is a rude means of washing, a table, and a bedstead. Upon the latter sits a man of sixty, reading. 164 He looks up for a moment, gives an impatient, dogged shake, and fixes his eyes upon his book again. As we withdraw our heads the door closes on him, and is fastened as before. This man has murdered his wife and will probably be hanged.

“‘How long has he been here?’

“‘A month.’

“‘When will he be tried?’

“‘Next term.’

“‘When is that?’

“‘Next month.’

“‘In England, if a man is under sentence of death even, he has air and exercise at certain periods of the day.’

“‘Possible?’

“With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and how loungingly he leads on to the woman’s side, making, as he goes, a kind of castanet of the key on the stair rail.

“Each cell-door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; others shrink away in shame. For what offense can that lonely child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh, that boy? He is the son of a prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against his father, and is detained here for safe keeping until the trial, that’s all.

“But it is a dreadful place for the child to 165 pass the long days and nights in. This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is it not? What says our conductor?

“‘Well, it ain’t a very rowdy life, and that’s a fact.’

“Again he clinks his metal castanet and leads us leisurely away. I have a question to ask him as we go.

“‘Pray, why do they call this place the Tombs?’

“‘Well, it’s the cant name.’

“‘I know it is. Why?’

“‘Some suicides happened here when it was first built. I expect it came about from that.’”

It did not “come about from that” by any means. The Tombs was a comparatively new prison when Dickens saw it first. It was erected under an authorization of the Common Council of the city of New York, issued in 1833. At that time, Mr. John L. Stevens, of the Hoboken family who still keep up seigneurial state on the bank of the Hudson, having recently returned from an extended tour through Asia and the Holy Land, issued an account of his travels, with many illustrations of the rare and curious things he had seen. Among these was a representation of an ancient Egyptian tomb, accompanied by a full and accurate description. The 166 majestic proportions and sombre beauty of this mortuary structure so impressed the committee of the Common Council who had the selection of plans for the new jail that they adopted it as their model, and the general appearance and construction of the building was made to conform as closely as the necessities of its use permitted to Stevens’s design. As it stands it is probably the finest specimen of Egyptian architecture of its order to be found outside of Egypt itself, and the filth, squalor and grimy ugliness that hem it in only serve to accentuate its architectural beauty. Its official title is the City Prison, but the one by which it is best known was derived from the character of the edifice in “Stevens’s Travels,” after which it was planned.

From an artistic point of view the selection of a site for the Tombs was singularly unfortunate. At the date of its erection its location was upon the upper outskirts of the city. Now the town has grown beyond it miles upon miles. For years it stood in the heart of the lowest and most dangerous criminal district. Even now its surroundings of tenement-houses, workshops, dirty streets harboring dirty shops of the 167 basest order, are anything but inviting to the sightseer. Through Leonard and Franklin streets, which bound its lower and upper ends, one catches eastward glimpses of Baxter street festooned with the sidewalk displays of the old clo’ shops, and westward sees the passing life of Broadway. Elm street in the rear and Centre street in front of it abound in sour-savored groggeries and the shabby hang-dog offices of the lower order of criminal lawyers who practice at the bar of the Tombs court. The streets swarm with the children of the tenements, which line them with towering piles of unclean brick and mortar; and the pedestrians who navigate them, and who hang about the outside of the prison, as if held there by a spell and only awaiting their turn to pass within its walls, are for the most part of that skulking, evil class which knows the interior of the jail quite as well as its outer barriers, and the ways which lead to its frowning gate. For many years the passenger traffic of the New York Central Railroad was embarked at a depot occupying the block above the Tombs. Travelers were here taken on board cars which were dragged by mules or horses up to Fourth avenue 168 and Twenty-sixth street, where the locomotive replaced the teams as a motor. As the town grew the railroad removed its station to the site of the present Madison Square Garden building, and converted the old depot into a freight-house, in and out of which lines of cars drawn by long tandems of mules clanked day and night the year round. Now the freight depot is gone, and an enormous granite structure, which accommodates the various criminal courts, rises on its site. Between this building and the Tombs an enclosed bridge for the passage of prisoners to and from court spans the street.

The Tombs itself was built in the basin of a little lake which was once one of the romantic spots of Manhattan Island, and a favorite resort of the angler and the pleasure seeker. The lake was known as the Collect Pond, a corruption of the Dutch title “Kalckhoek,” or Shell Point, from a beach of shells which existed on its margin. The Collect was a fresh-water pond, fed by natural springs, and having an outlet by small streams into both the North and East rivers. Thus the pond and its creeks actually cut Manhattan Island in half and made 169 two islands of it. There were pleasure houses on the hillocks around the Collect, and on an island, in its centre, the city powder house was erected. The course of time worked the usual changes upon it for the worse. Tanners set up their tan pits near it, the city garbage was dumped into it, and among the marshes to the eastward the criminal colony, since infamous as the Five Points, commenced to form itself. There was still water enough in it in 1796 for John Fitch to experiment in navigating the first steamboat America ever saw, but a few years later, to give employment to clamorous and starving labor, at a period of industrial and commercial stagnation, the city ordered the hills around it to be leveled and the pond filled up with the earth removed from them. In spite of the reduction of the ground to the westward, the site remained much lower than the grade of Broadway, and the Tombs roof is scarcely above the line of that thoroughfare. To support the ponderous mass of Maine granite, which constituted the prison, a forest of piles was sunk deep in the sodden soil. The work of construction occupied five years, so that the prison had been in use scarcely four years when 170 Dickens made his visit to it—and, while its outer walls remain substantially the same, its internal construction has been vastly augmented and improved. When he saw it the city watch-house occupied part of the building; and he makes a record of a night visit to “those black sties” where “men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapors which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench.” The watch-house was on the Franklin street side of the jail, and was long kept up as a police station. Now it is used as a common room for the confinement of vagrants and drunkards picked up on the streets, pending their confinement to the penal institutions.

Of another old and hideous institution which one cannot disassociate with the Tombs, in spite of the abolition of it which has been decreed by law, Dickens wrote:

“The prison yard, in which he pauses now, has been the scene of terrible performances. Into this narrow, grave-like place men are brought out to die. The wretched creature stands beneath the gibbet on the ground; the rope is about his neck; and when the sign is given a 171 weight at its other end comes running down and swings him up into the air—a corpse. The law requires that there be present at this dismal spectacle the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of twenty-five. From the community it is hidden. To the dissolute and bad the thing remains a frightful mystery. Between the criminal and them the prison wall is interposed as a thick and gloomy veil. It is the curtain to his bed of death, his winding sheet and grave. From him it shuts out life and all the motives to unrepenting hardihood in that last hour, which its mere sight and presence is often all sufficient to sustain. There are no bold eyes to make him bold; no ruffians to uphold a ruffian’s name before. All beyond the pitiless stone wall is unknown space.”

At the time of Dickens’s visit (1842) London was still the scene of public hangings, and the privacy with which the executions in the Tombs were conducted furnished him with a text for one of his protests against the existing state of things at home. The Tombs hangings were private, as he stated, but they were not unattended by morbid interest on the part of the mob. On the morning of an execution, the obscene streets all about would swarm with obscene life. From their festering dens in the Five Points, and from the remoter haunts of 172 vice and crime which had grown up with the growth of the town, the social banditti came in a scowling, ribald and revolting legion. They camped on doorsteps before dawn, and all the groggeries drove a roaring trade. They beguiled the time with gloating reminiscences of their criminal lives, and watched the jail roof for a signal that the ghastly work within was done. Curiously enough, nature had provided them with a sign as certain as the running up of the black flag upon the wall of Newgate. A great number of pigeons had found lodgment in the Tombs yard, nesting in cotes which had been put up for them along the inner jail walls and in the eaves of the buildings themselves. Long immunity from human aggressions had rendered them fearless, and when the audience gathered for an execution, under the gray shadow of the jail walls, the pigeons were equally certain to assemble, cooing and pluming themselves in the sunlight above. When, at the fatal moment, the heavy thud of the executioner’s axe denoted the severing of the cord which supported the counterweights and sent the victim whirling to his death, the birds, startled by the sound, would rise upward in 173 flurried flight, circle about a couple of times and settle at their perches again. It was by this confused and frightened movement of the pigeons above the walls that the waiting rabble knew the unseen tragedy of the law was done.

A moment later the race of reporters and messenger boys from the prison gate to the newspaper offices close by would begin, and in half an hour all the ghastly details of the event, described with such circumstantiality and such sensational exaggeration as the horror-hungry public was expected to crave for, would be hawked at every street corner and carried by swift runners and overdriven wagons to the most distant quarters of the town. To such extreme was this practice stretched that, on the occasions of later executions in the Tombs, reporters would actually be sent to spend the night in prison, and to record the last hours of a worthless brute whose just doom should have been a swift death and complete oblivion. Evil as the influence of a public hanging may have been, it may be doubted if it was any worse than the practice of the press in investing the attendant circumstances of a vile and dangerous 174 wretch’s end with the mock heroism of cheap bravado and the clap-trap sentiment of literary fustian. The law providing for the execution of criminals by electricity, and in secret, has performed one public service, at least, in doing away with these outdoor gatherings at the Tombs on hanging day.