Essex County
NORTH CALDWELL — The demolition of the historic Essex County penitentiary is a crime against history and heritage, an area historian says.
Designed in the prevailing Italianate Victorian style and built in 1872 of locally quarried and crafted brownstone on a hill overlooking what is now the border of North Caldwell and Verona, the jail is making room for a different demographic — a housing development.
"This is such a significant loss," said Robert L. Williams, who is Verona’s historian and has been documenting the former jail for five years. "It’s a magnificent structure."
Demolition of the sprawling jail complex began a few weeks ago and will conclude by next month, according to a representative for Red Bank-based K. Hovnanian Cos., the development company that owns the land.
Prisoners last did time at the penitentiary in 2004, two years after the county agreed to sell the site to the developer as part of one of the largest public land deals in state history.
All that’s left of a regal facility on a hill is the main building’s four-story tower, which served as the administrative wing. Gone are the women’s jail wing, chapel, hospital and recreation room, along with several satellite structures.
Aside from the buildings, Williams laments the loss of the reddish rock itself. On one such brownstone, measuring about 10 feet long and 3 feet wide, a chisel’s work marks time and craft.
"Imagine the time it would have taken to quarry that," said Williams, whose family has been in the area since the 1670s. "Look at how this stone is beautifully tooled. It took a lot of craftsmanship."
Most of the rock is likely to be crushed.
The tower roof’s copper cornice has already been carted away. In front and back, excavator buckets lie on the dusty ground. Shale, ventilation equipment and plumbing fixtures dot the property.
Steps from the standing tower, the jail’s cell doors, a few from the 1870s, are a piled jumble of white bars. Floor joists and attic timbers, dating from not long after the end of the Civil War, lie neatly stacked.
At the rear of the tower building, a floor-length red and yellowish-gold stencil of fruit baskets with flames will get pounded by sun and rain until it, too, is knocked to earth.
Inside, on exposed truss work in large painted block letters, the past has names.
"AND. GARREY. 1882," reads one inscription.
"Herbert Earl, 11.1900," says another.
Aside from the nearby quarries prisoners would comb for stone, the grounds also nourished.
"When my grandfather worked there, there was a farm, a chicken coop and a piggery," said Stephen Pringle, who followed in his granddad’s footsteps and began his correctional career at the penitentiary as an officer in 1990.
Pringle, who worked at the "Escopen," as it was known, until 1996 and is now an associate warden at the county jail on Doremus Avenue in Newark, said the old jail’s layout obliged officers to engage the prisoners, many of whom were petty criminals.
"It was certainly unique," said Pringle. "You were inside with the inmates. You would communicate. … You were forced to interact."
These days, the facility’s administrative offices are a mess of detritus and graffiti. Beneath peeling turquoise plaster that resembles garish, cracked mud, a faux walnut finish reveals itself. Despite the wear and the tear, the careful craftsmanship of decorative molding and of the door surrounding it is still impressive.
Joyce Pisani, president of the North Caldwell Historical Society, said she and Williams approached K. Hovnanian with plans showing how the central tower could be preserved in a new development. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and the tower is scheduled to be toppled.
"But that building could have been saved and incorporated into the project as maybe a clubhouse," she said. "It’s a little heartbreaking to us. The fact that they couldn’t do anything but tear it down."
Down the hill from the jail, the developer is building a 108-unit active-adult community but has no firm plans for the jail site, a company representative said.
On a recent, hot afternoon, a crow’s call from the woods at the top of the hill rippled through the valley.
"This was truly a masterpiece," Williams said outside the jail’s walls. "You won’t ever see the likes of a building like this ever again. The irony of it all is this was a prison."
An exterior shot of at the old Essex County Penitentiary located in North Caldwell in 2007.
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