Riker's Island

Thought to have been bought by an early 17th-century Dutch settler called Abraham Rycken for whose family it is named, Riker's Island was sold to New York City by his descendants in 1884. Even then the Riker name was tainted. Magistrate Richard Riker, the patriarch of the family in the early 1800s, used his position as a judge to authorize the kidnapping of free African Americans to be sold down south into slavery. With its purchase, the City intended on building a workhouse, on the land that had previously functioned as a pig farm and troop training facility.

However, the island would remain unused until the 1920s when the City decided it needed a replacement for the ancient Blackwell's Island Prison (on what is now known as Roosevelt Island). However, first Riker's Island had to be expanded with mountains of trash brought in by barges and convict labor. With the garbage came hordes of rats. The City's solution to this was to import dogs to the island who were nourished only by devouring the thousands of rats that sought the trash.

It was on this ominous bedrock that Ryker's Jail was built, opening its doors to inmates in 1932. It was only seven years later that a Bronx court would condemn it for being overcrowded, filthy, and plagued with violence. Over the next decades, the crack epidemics of the 70s and 80s only caused the overpopulation and brutality to grow further. Riker's Island still suffers from these problems to this date and remains open, despite campaign promises from numerous politicians to shutter the jail.