100 Objects #21: Window from the House of D

How a women’s prison in Greenwich Village, and its unusual open windows, helped shape queer community and the modern gay rights movement.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:59Roman Mars?

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• 1:39Speaker 03

  Are you rolling, Marty?

• 1:42Roman Mars?

  This is Audra Lord, the celebrated writer and poet. She's been interviewed here for an oral history about Greenwich Village. It's a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan that today is one of the most famously gay places in the country. Think Rainbow Crosswalks, the Stonewall Inn. But back when Audra moved there in the late 40s, it was just starting to get that reputation.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  The village was the place where the outsiders went. The place, the artists, the funny people.

• 2:20Roman Mars?

  Audra had long known that she was one of the funny people. Queer, a black poet in an all-white high school. So at 17, she left home for good.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  I came to the idea of lesbian community, of gay girls through the village, through my friends and I going down and going to Washington Square Park and trying to decide, you know, is she one? You know, is she?

• 2:47Roman Mars?

  The way she describes the village, it has this dreamy, out of time quality to it.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  It was a place you went to be free, to be free on the streets, to be able to hold hands, you know? And no one would bother you. You could walk through with a flower in your hair, you know, and not be accosted.

• 3:09Roman Mars?

  And then about 20 minutes in, the interviewer changes the subject.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Tell me about the House of Detention, the Women's House of Detention.

• 3:18Roman Mars?

  And you'd think the mood would shift, but it doesn't.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  The Women's House of Detention on 11th? Oh, wow. Well, I don't know very much about the Women's House of Detention, except it was a real presence in our lives.

• 3:32Roman Mars?

  The Women's House of Detention was New York City's very first prison for women, smack dab in the middle of the village. Audra herself was never locked up there, but that's the thing. She didn't have to be to really know the place. The prison, or the House of D, as it was called, had a way of spilling out onto the street because there was this thing about the windows. They opened.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  And the Women's House of D had a real life of its own because total conversations would go on, particularly in weekend nights. If you stood across Greenwich Avenue and yelled up to the, to the women in the upper stories, and they would be communicating. So there was always a sense of this being another kind of outlaw tree that we were somehow connected with.

• 4:25Roman Mars?

  And the scene of the women yelling down to the street and the streets yelling back up? It wasn't just Audra who took note of it.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Every single person that I talked to about Greenwich Village in these years and about the House of D, that's what they remembered. The women calling down and the people calling back up.

• 4:45Roman Mars?

  That's historian Hugh Ryan. He spent years digging through the archives to write the first full history of the House of D. And he says, none of this was supposed to happen. All that talk between the prison and the street, it was just a side effect of the choice to install a particular type of window.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  They wanted a window that looked like a normal city window.

• 5:10Roman Mars?

  Originally, they were supposed to be a sort of kindness, a way to signal that the place was for rehabilitation, not punishment. Hugh brought in an advertisement from the 30s to give a better sense of what the windows looked like. In the advert, it shows like a little piece of the window opening up. It's real cantilevers out. It was meant to be open for ventilation. Was communication and talking to people on the street like part of the calculation? Or you think this was just an oversight?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Total oversight. The windows don't start for a couple floors up because they thought that would be significant distance to keep people from communicating out. They didn't realize when you're desperate and you've been trapped inside a overcrowded cage for months on end, you are willing to shout below down to anyone out there, whether it's the person you intend to talk to, whether you are sharing your deepest, darkest secrets, or whether you are just yelling so that someone recognizes that you are still alive.

• 6:08Roman Mars?

  The windows were the single most important thing about the building. For the next 40 years, the women inside the House of D shouted down and the neighborhood shouted back.

• 6:20Roman Mars?

  And Hugh argues that the fact that this prison sat in the mecca of gay America isn't a coincidence.

• 6:28Roman Mars?

  That the prison itself, with its special windows, actually played a major role, and stick with me here, in making the village queer.

• 6:40Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 objects. I'm Roman Mars.

• 6:49Roman Mars?

  Today, the windows in the House of D.

• 7:01Roman Mars?

  So the story that we're going to tell today is about the first women's prison in New York City. But I want to back up like decades before that because there was a time when we didn't send women to prison at all. Prison was only meant for men. Could you describe this?

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So the history of incarceration in America is interesting because before basically the Civil War, the places where we incarcerated people were mostly meant to handle the violent actions of white men. Women and people of color were rarely incarcerated because punishment and detention was handled through the nuclear family. It was your husband. If you were unmarried, it was your father or your brothers. If you were an enslaved black woman, it was the family that owned you. And then with the Civil War, not only are enslaved women freed, but many, many, many white women move into the workforce, move into the kind of public lives that meant that they were now under the thumb of the state.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  So there becomes this moment where there's a recognition that we need to create prisons for women because women are being arrested.

• 8:10Roman Mars?

  And what are they being arrested for?

• 8:12Speaker 04

  So women, particularly black women, but all working class women, and particularly women who are judged to be unfeminine, start to get arrested for prostitution or disorder, which is a code word for prostitution. In the late 1800s, there were four jobs that a woman could have. Three of them were legal. Wife, mother, and the raiser of children. So nursemaids or nannies, maybe even some kinds of teachers. And then there was the one illegal job, prostitute. So in the eyes of the law, any woman who was not feminine enough to be a wife, a mother, or a nursemaid to children, meaning any woman who talked back, wore pants, smoked, wanted an education,

• 8:56Speaker 04

  could not have a legal job as a woman. And so she would inevitably end up on the streets where she would end up a prostitute. And so most of the arrests we see of women are for prostitution and not because of the exchange for sex for money. In fact, in New York State by the early 1900s, they've written into the law that that is not part of this. Prostitution is the common lewdness of woman.

• 9:20Roman Mars?

  So it's not about anything that they've like actually done?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  No. In every way, what is being built in the 19th century is a sort of anticipatory justice. It's not about crimes that have been committed. It's about what might happen, what these women might do or how they might be a burden on the state in the future.

• 9:39Roman Mars?

  This idea of criminalizing women's wayward behavior, it's part of a larger reform movement happening in the country, one that is led by other women.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  They're called the social feminists. These are the same people who will eventually bring us both the right to vote, the suffragettes, and the temperance movement. These women saw themselves as helping their fallen sisters, right? So it's a sympathetic movement, but it's a pitying movement. It's sort of a looking down upon while also offering a hand up. They wanted to look at people and say, if we are going to reform them, if a prison isn't a place where you go just to be punished, if the institution is meant to improve the person inside it, how do we do that? And when it comes to women, the way they determined to do that was to set up institutions whose job it is to make women properly feminine.

• 10:30Roman Mars?

  And by institutions, these women weren't just talking about prisons. If they were going to save all the souls of their fallen sisters, they needed to think bigger.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Men and women are so different from one another, right? So they say women need their own kind of justice.

• 10:46Roman Mars?

  Which meant different laws, different prisons, and a different court. But building a prison from scratch took time and money. So they decided to tackle the court first. And in 1910, they got it. The city's first women's court, right in the center of Greenwich Village.

• 11:04Roman Mars?

  And the thing to note about this new court was that everything took place after dark, after 8:00 PM and sometimes well into the morning.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  And it becomes a thing that people go to. Upper class people go to watch these women. Oh, it doesn't just become a thing for people to go to. It is built to be a thing for people to go to.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  When they opened the night court, the women's court in 1910, they built stadium-style seating, they handed out flyers, they put out a theatrical sign outside it so that it would say "standing room only" or "full," like it was a theater. They convinced people to come down and visit.

• 11:46Roman Mars?

  And the spectacle, it moved fast. A woman would be marched up to the bench. Tourists and tabloid reporters would ogle. She'd plead guilty or be found guilty. It really didn't matter because all that was needed to lock a woman up was the word of the arresting officer. And then they'd bring up the next one.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  When it first opened up, the courts were almost pornographic. And I mean that literally. And what they would do is they would fingerprint them on one side of the courthouse and then bring them to a sheet room that was curtained off and do an invasive vaginal inspection there as well. And so all of this is happening in front of audiences who can hear everything, who they can't see because of the sheet, but they're there because this is just as pornographic as the reason these women are supposedly being arrested. It's a titillation. It's to teach women how you should behave. Because if you don't behave properly, this is what will be done to you.

• 12:43Roman Mars?

  If the point was to scare women into behaving, it failed spectacularly. Recidivism was rampant. Through the early years, about half the women standing in front of that bench had stood there before. What the court did change was the neighborhood.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  You know, we have this history in Greenwich Village of it being this bohemian place, this place full of cafes and bars and theaters. But before the court opened up, that wasn't true. Greenwich Village was called Greenwich Village because it was the quaintest, oldest, most village-like part of Manhattan. It was considered very traditional. The court opens up, suddenly you have all of these women who are being arrested all around the city for every kind of quote-unquote "non-feminine" behavior. They're all brought down to Greenwich Village, where they are advertised as an entertainment for rich people looking to go slumming, who are bored of Chinatown and don't want to go to the theater. Instead, you can come and watch these women, who are a new storyline every single night.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  And within 10 years of the court opening, Greenwich Village is suddenly the center for all kinds of entertainments, vaudeville performances. It gets this reputation as being the most diverse, integrated. You know, we don't think about the prison as a driver of culture, but in almost every way, Greenwich Village as we know it today is a result of this courthouse.

• 14:06Roman Mars?

  That was the court. But the court was only half of what the reformers wanted. The other half was a prison. Because women convicted in New York City were still, for the most part, being jailed alongside men. And in 1928, they got their chance. The decrepit prison next door was already coming down. And the mayor gave the approval to rebuild it as the city's first women-only prison. This one, they promised, would be nothing like the prisons that came before.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  It's going to be bigger, brighter, nicer, kinder.

• 14:37Roman Mars?

  And if this place was going to be about rehabilitation instead of punishment, then it had to look the part.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  The architecture of the prison was intended to inspire the soul. So you have this kind of soaring architecture. It's the architecture that we associate with noir stories, right? It's very heavy. It's got the weight of the state to it, you know? But it's also got rhythm.

• 15:02Roman Mars?

  If there was one thing the reformers were certain would not inspire the soul, it was iron bars. So they went shopping, and the Bailey Company had exactly what they wanted. The advert from the 1930s reads-

• 15:15Speaker 04

  "These windows have been designed to give an abundance of light and ventilation, and yet are as nearly escape-proof as modern steel construction can make them. They make outside bars unnecessary and do away with the jail-like appearance of the buildings."

• 15:30Roman Mars?

  And from the street, they pulled it off. Tall, dark windows running up the face of the building, the way you'd see in a factory or an office block. The prison was widely called the only art deco prison in the world. And the building's beautiful to look at. I mean, it was notable because it was so beautiful.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, because before it opens, you hear that all the time. So there's this popular joke in the village in late 20s that goes, you know, "A woman stopped by the building site for the House of Detention today, and she said to the guard, 'How do I get an apartment in this place?'" And the guard says, "Honey, you shoot your husband."

• 16:07Roman Mars?

  But the plans went further than the facade. A full hospital covering several floors, a whole suite of psychological services.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Because again, it's about these women's souls. It's about saving them.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  I would like to open up the doors of the institution we call the Women's House of Detention. Here, we're trying a unique experiment in rehabilitation in order that we may help them reorient themselves into proper living when they leave us.

• 16:36Roman Mars?

  In 1932, the Women's House of Detention finally opened. But while it was still being built, the country fell into the depression. The money went, and the enthusiasm for rehabilitation went with it. By the time the doors opened, the hospital was massively scaled down. The psychological staff was two women for a population of 600.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  The system stripped out everything except for the detention capabilities. That was all that was left.

• 17:09Roman Mars?

  That and the windows, looking out over the busiest corner in Greenwich Village. The windows were the last piece of the reformers' vision left standing. And while they certainly didn't provide an abundance of light and ventilation, the part that could open was tiny. One single 12 by 12-inch pane of glass, they did open. And this choice would have consequences far larger than anyone had imagined.

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• 19:42Roman Mars?

  The House of D opened in 1932. And right away, the whole point of the place, to turn these women into proper wives and mothers, ran into a problem. For a pretty obvious reason, if you think about who was actually being arrested.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  They were going after people who were not properly feminine. And that could mean a lot of things, right? That could mean you were too sexual. It could mean you were frigid. It could mean you wore pants. But many of the things were about the sort of rejection of what we would today call heteronormativity. Again, words that did not exist at that time.

• 20:13Roman Mars?

  Yeah, sure.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  But that was the crime. That was the essential crime. So the prison is filled with queer women and trans men. And what happens is that the prison becomes a space where people who are queer and understand themselves to be queer interact with one another. And people who do not yet know anything about queerness get educated.

• 20:35Roman Mars?

  Hugh knows this because of the files. Social workers kept records of every woman who came through, organized under the Women's Prison Association, the same reformers who'd lobbied for the prison in the first place.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  For instance, one of the first files I opened up was a woman named Charlotte. Charlotte was arrested, when she was young, for running away. She was very butch. And in her first instance in court, they have a public discussion about whether she is a homo-sexual, right? And she understood what they meant by that. As she would later say, "It wasn't my fault women looked up to me like a good-looking football hero." But she had never heard the word. And she didn't have any sense that there was something like sexuality and identity that could be based on who you desired that wasn't about your body? She's coming out of a 19th-century mindset where everything we understand about queerness is about having a differently-sexed or what we would today call an intersex body, right?

• 21:32Speaker 04

  She gets educated about queerness through this system because the system knows the problem it is trying to deal with. And that problem is being an un-feminine woman.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  From the very start, all of the records talk about how it is a problem to put all of these women together in this place, how homosexuality will be rife there, how they will be unsexed.

• 21:56Roman Mars?

  They were right. The queer population inside kept growing, and it didn't stay inside. It spread out into the neighborhood, and that, in large part, was due to what happened when a woman from the House of D was released.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  You're given like a nickel, a dime. There are, over and over again, commissions in New York City who are like, if you release a woman with only a dime and no job or home, what do you think she is going to do? She's gonna end up right back in the prison, and the prison administration is like, yup, we're gonna keep doing it, though.

• 22:28Roman Mars?

  So the same women kept coming back, and in between stints with no money to get anywhere else, they stayed close, on the sidewalk on Greenwich Avenue, right below the women still locked up inside. And what's particularly interesting about the House of D in Greenwich Village is because it's a jail, because it has open communication between it and the surrounding neighborhood, sort of like makes the village more queer. It doesn't just concentrate it.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Over and over again, if you look at stories, or plays, or movies, things set in Greenwich Village in these years, the voices of these women are there. Tom Wolfe writes one of the first, like, big pieces of new journalism about Greenwich Village, and he talks about the women yelling down, and how they taunt the men outside, and ask them if they've ever had sex, and they make fun of them. I interviewed a playwright who told me that when she was young and she came to Greenwich Village to meet Bohemia, she befriended Junna Barnes, who by that point was old, and she would walk around with a cane very slowly, and she would walk Junna Barnes over to the prison where women would throw down a cigarette box on a string, and Junna would put cigarettes and dollar

• 23:44Speaker 04

  bills in it for them and send them back up above.

• 23:47Roman Mars?

  Most of what got shouted up and down those blocks disappeared into the air. One person turned it into music.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  When Melvin Van Peebles, the author, filmmaker, moves back to America from France, he ends up living in Greenwich Village right below the House of Detention, and he hears the women calling up and down. This becomes the basis for an entire album that he wrote called Brave Soul.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  So there was this whole wonderful, wonderful world of people talking to their loved ones, and I said, wow, this would make a great song.

• 24:27Roman Mars?

  This is, of course, the Melvin Van Peebles.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  And so I wrote a song. Da-da-da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-da. How they treating you, sugar? Make some kind of sign so I know it's you. Make me some kind of sign so I know it's you. Cause you so far away. They would open their hearts up to their loved ones. It was poignant. It was wonderful. But no one was capturing this.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  That album becomes a Broadway show called Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death in the 1970s.

• 25:03Speaker 06

  I miss you. Baby, if you gonna ever come back and dance with me.

• 25:11Roman Mars?

  This song, called 10th and Greenwich, was apparently the first lesbian love song performed on Broadway.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  This created the sound of Greenwich Village. People, particularly those who were butch or trans, said this was the first and only time I saw gender non-conforming women on the street. They were standing there having these conversations, right? This changed this intersection at the heart of Greenwich Village.

• 25:35Roman Mars?

  A prison built to make women quiet and private and feminine instead produced the loudest, queerest street corner in America, and it stayed that way through the '30s, through the '40s, even through the '50s.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  Throughout the most homophobic period in American history, right? Post-World War II, when it's like, women in the kitchen and everybody, you know, salute the flag. They're shutting down gay bars all around the city. They are raiding drag shows. They are arresting people in the streets. They are sending you to get therapized and cured of your homosexuality.

• 26:07Roman Mars?

  This is the time of McCarthyism, and running alongside the Red Scare was another targeted purge: the Lavender Scare.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  So the Lavender Scare is happening in the State Department, but it spreads much, much, much further than that. What it does is, it takes this 1950s idea of like, normal, good, gender normative, not a communist, and spreads it through the country and makes everyone ask the question like, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the lesbian party? And the communist party, too. But it's both of these fears entwined around one another that spread around the country in the 1950s.

• 26:47Roman Mars?

  The federal government spent the '50s hunting for the insidious homosexual, the one hiding in the file room, the one who could be blackmailed. Meanwhile, on Greenwich Avenue, the state of New York had several hundred of them stacked 11 stories high with the windows open. And at first, the prison tried to do what Washington was doing: find them, mark them, and keep them away from everybody else.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  They start putting the letter "D" for degenerate on the uniforms of any woman arrested for a specifically gay crime, or anyone who's just judged as being really butch. But again, it's too many of them. They cannot separate these women out. That's what every woman tells me over and over again. 75% of us were queer.

• 27:32Roman Mars?

  Also, the women devised an ingenious way of protecting one another.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  If two women were wanting to have sex, to have a date, you know, they would go down to a cell at the end of a corridor, and all the other women would lay down in the corridor, basically like speed bumps, having a conversation, so that if a guard started to come that way, they would have to like slowly make their way over them, and they would have time to call out to the two women in the back room, hey, Mabel, did you get those cigarettes yet? You know, to cue them in as to what was happening.

• 28:01Roman Mars?

  And then the prison started filling up with people who already knew how to organize.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  We get these activists who are arrested, communist activists in the '50s, and then in the '60s, we start to get Black Liberation, Young Lord, gay liberation activists, all being arrested. And inside these institutions, they come to realize that although they may seem very different on the outside, when they're put in the prison, the system views them the exact same way, as a failure of womanhood, whether that's because you are black, or militant, or communist, or lesbian. And they start to understand themselves as having common interests.

• 28:36Roman Mars?

  Common grievances, like the overcrowding, the barbaric pelvic exams, the vermin, these were the things they started to shout together out the window.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  By the 1950s, incarcerated women in the House of Detention realized that they could not get attention in the courts, right? They could not get journalists to listen to them. They could rarely even get communication in and out of the prison. But if you set a blanket on fire and you throw it out that window, they will notice. And so they started rioting. This is how the women in the prison started making their feelings known.

• 29:13Roman Mars?

  On the night of June 28, 1969, there were about 600 people locked in the House of D. One of them was a woman named Afeni Shakur.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  You might know her as one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party, or as Tupac Shakur's mother. She is this incredible activist. She's a young woman, a leader in the Black Panther Party, when all of these Panthers are arrested in 1968, '69 on these conspiracy charges, trumped-up charges for all of these bombings that did not happen and were not real. She is one of the two black queer women who were leaders in the Panther Party who were actually incarcerated in the House of Detention on the first night of the Stonewall riots.

• 29:58Roman Mars?

  I think Stonewall is one of those moments in history that people think they know, but they probably can't give you a lot of details about. Could you quickly walk me through what happened at Stonewall and how the women at the House of D were involved in this?

• 30:13Speaker 04

  So, we'll start right off the bat. Stonewall was like six nights. It wasn't one night. There's a first night, and it's an important first night, right? The police raid the Stonewall bar, patrons resist, we get this fighting back, it becomes this flashpoint. The women in the House of Detention are like 500 feet away. They can hear what's happening. They have rioted previously, and they know how to do this, right? They set fire to their belongings, these little windows, these Bailey windows, they're just wide enough that you can get your hand out and you could throw something at the people below.

• 30:42Roman Mars?

  Hugh actually heard a description of this in an oral history from a woman named Arce Flynn. Arce was driving home through the village, east on Greenwich Avenue, when she saw the women inside the House of Detention joining in with the people on the streets below.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  I saw all these tiny little fires coming out of the women's House of Detention. They had lit cigarette boxes and cellophane from the cigarette packs and whatever books, and they had dropped them out through the bars in the window. Then I stopped the car and parked and tried to listen to what the women were saying. They were screaming, gay rights, gay rights, gay rights.

• 31:23Roman Mars?

  The Stonewall uprising lasts six days, and when it's over, the crowd doesn't really disperse. It converts. All that energy moves indoors, into meetings, full of people who weren't activists a week ago, sitting across from people who've been organizing quietly for 15 years. And the question on the table is where to point the energy next.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  And they say, we want to protest the prison in support of the Black Panthers who are incarcerated there. And the older activists say, don't do anything that will piss off the cops. We don't support this. And the younger activists immediately walk out of the meeting, and they announce themselves to be the Gay Liberation Front, a name they've taken from the Viet Cong, the Vietnamese Liberation Front, the communist organization. And their first action is to protest the women's House of Detention.

• 32:13Roman Mars?

  Historians have called the Gay Liberation Front, or the GLF, the incubator of the modern gay rights movement. And the thing that started it all was a prison, the Women's House of Detention. In fact, the GLF, along with a half dozen other groups, were behind what became known as the First Pride March, held on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. And they kept protesting the House of D. They held rallies, set up a round-the-clock vigil that ran for a week. At one protest, one of the marchers brought his own reporter to capture it. Line up, everybody. Come on. A public radio reporter and one of the founders of the GLF, Charles Pitt. We're passing the Women's House of Detention.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  Many of the windows, there are forms, the windows are dirty, but there are people waving from the windows. The chant that they were chanting, which I didn't understand, was "Free Our Sisters in the House of Dee."

• 33:22Roman Mars?

  Okay, so I want to step back because I don't know exactly how to ask this, but I want you to think through this with me. So this place, the House of Dee, it targets queer women in particular. And a prison is not a great place. But it's also this place where the women find themselves. They understand their sexuality more. You know, like, they're taught about what community they could belong in, what they could be a part of, what families they can form. I mean, these are really hard things to reconcile, the goodness and the badness that's mixed in with all this sort of stuff. So how do you tease that apart?

• 33:53Speaker 04

  You know, I talked to a lot of women who were incarcerated there. Jay Tool, incredible activist, she talked to me a lot about her times at the House of Detention. And at one point, she said to me, "A lot of us called it the prison, but a lot of us called it the playground. It was where you met other queer women." And so many of these women not only met each other there, but would tell stories about how, you know, they had never really thought about the idea of desiring another woman until they were in the prison and they met women who had had relationships with other women.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  I think so much of queer history, queer life in America, certainly pre-21st century, is about the repurposing of things that were not meant for us, right? What is camp? What is the taking up of, you know, heterosexual melodramas? What is, what is drag? So much of this is about taking a world that we are forced to exist inside and saying, "What can we make of this our own?"

• 34:56Speaker 04

  People, no matter where you put us, we want to live. We want to create. We want to laugh. We want to yell. And if all we're given to do that through is a prison, yeah, we'll do it there, right? You can't legislate us out of existence. You can't even put us in cages. You kill us and it won't matter. The saving grace and the fatal flaw of straight people is that they make more queer people, right? And so these kind of attempts inevitably fail.

• 35:32Roman Mars?

  In 1971, the House of Dee shuttered. The complaints from inside had gotten too loud, the abuses too egregious to ignore. The women quietly were bussed out to a new institution on Rikers Island.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  Much like the House of Dee, in the announcements about this new institution, it's going to be bigger, brighter, nicer, kinder. It's going to have a room for women who are pregnant and a nursery for children, all of which is stripped out before, of course, it opens. I mean, it is just as bad as the House of Detention and worse. And now it's on an island. It's impossible to get there. It takes two hours. It costs a lot of money. And all of these incarcerated people, who at least before were able to be visited, are now truly isolated. And that, of course, is the goal, right? We don't want this kind of communication between the incarcerated and the non-incarcerated.

• 36:23Roman Mars?

  The House of Dee closed right as the country descended into an age of mass incarceration. In the early 1970s, the US had around 300,000 people locked up. Within 30 years, it was close to 2 million. All those people had to go somewhere, and it wasn't cities. Through the 1990s, a new prison opened somewhere in rural America once about every 15 days. And that's where most people in state and federal prison are now. Emptied farm country, shuttered mill towns, prisons built over old coal mines. Now, the windows don't open. And even if they did, you'd be shouting into an empty field.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  When I think about the lessons we can learn from the House of Detention, it goes back to those windows, right? The windows were a moment of communication, of openness, of, of space. And they make me ask this question. I think the essential question we should be asking today, anytime we do any story on prisons. Why do we think that detention is the right method for dealing with social distortion? What is it about putting someone in a cage, away from their community, their family, their jobs, education, the sun, that we think will improve something? The windows on the House of Detention feel like this very last moment where the judicial system, the legal system in America,

• 37:48Speaker 04

  was, was asking that question.

• 37:51Roman Mars?

  The House of Dee, sitting on a bustling corner of Grinch Village, couldn't be ignored, and its presence had an impact on the people around it.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  I had never thought about women in prison.

• 38:07Roman Mars?

  Including Audra Lord, who spent years walking past it.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  And then a prison in the middle of where I'm living, it brought home to me a kind of a very essential

• 38:21Speaker 03

  reality about prisons and about women in prison. A connectedness that I would not have gotten any other place. I think many of us just would never have thought of.

• 38:35Roman Mars?

  When the House of Dee came down, it took that with it. Not just the women, the fact of them. It's easy to look away from a prison and its issues when it's two hours upstate. It's a harder thing to do when its population is screaming out a window on your walk home.

• 38:59Roman Mars?

  Hugh Ryan is the author of The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. His latest book is My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer 90s and Beyond.

• 39:16Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Ellie Lightfoot. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabie and Brenna Dahldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé. And the production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.

• 40:02Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, headquartered in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

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