Managed Time

A 360-degree street-level view at Concord Avenue and East 141st Street: the corner building and the brick row on the west side, a tall new apartment building behind them, the jail site behind a green construction fence across the street, and the steel frame of a new building at the right. — Concord Avenue at East 141st Street, 24 March 2026. The row where 327 Concord Avenue stood until 2023, with the Department of Homeless Services family shelter at 323 Jackson Avenue behind it; the Bronx jail site behind the green construction fence; and the steel frame of a two-story last-mile logistics facility at 307 Bruckner Boulevard. © Cyclomedia Technology B.V.

15 July 2026 · 40.8064, −73.9094 · Excavator drilling at the jail site.

An excavator drilling at the Mott Haven jail site.

This site reads the public record of Mott Haven, in the South Bronx, where New York City is building a jail. The 1,040-bed facility¹ is one of four borough-based jails, in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, that the City is building to replace the jails on Rikers Island. The City presents the program as a “smaller, safer, fairer” jail system. Around the site, Mott Haven is living through a housing and environmental crisis: severe rent burden in Bronx CD1 rose from 27.8% to 37.2% of rent-paying households between the 2006–2010 and 2020–2024 American Community Survey — a rise of 9.4 points (the Census tabulation area for Bronx Community District 1) — and child asthma emergency department visits in Community District 1 ran at 326.9 per 10,000 children in 2023. The same 2019 approvals that sited the jail set aside part of its block for about 235 affordable homes, so that jail and housing on this ground came through one set of applications. Each section of this site follows how the City manages time, stability and movement here: what it has scheduled, what it has transferred between its own agencies, how land is zoned and rezoned, how long its records have run at four sites, the hours of work it permits and monitors, and the closures, transfers and vacate orders through which it moves and destabilizes people. The Gap sets out what the record leaves out. Fieldwork holds the recordings made on site, and the Glossary defines the terms. The position from which it reads the record is set out on ABOUT.

1 Beds in the City’s current plan for each borough facility: 1,040 (Independent Rikers Commission, A Path Forward: The Blueprint to Close Rikers, March 2025, p. 16). The 2019 land-use approvals gave different figures; see SCHEDULED.

SCHEDULED: The jail: approved in 2019, with substantial completion expected in the second quarter of 2031.
TRANSFERRED: One City block passed between City agencies: a hospital, a tow pound, a jail, and a lot marked for housing.
ZONED: Row houses on Concord Avenue, facing the jail’s construction site, under manufacturing zoning since 1961.
DURATION: Four lots, and how long their records run.
MONITORED HOURS: The hours at the jail site: when work is permitted, when it is authorized beyond that, and when the instruments are measuring.
RELOCATION: The records that move people and institutions: detention to be moved from Rikers, shelter closures, orders to vacate.
THE GAP: What the record does not contain, including this project’s own errors.