EASTRIVER
RIKERS ISLANDBefore it was a correctional facility, Rikers was a farm, on land owned since 1664 by the Dutch family Rycken, then a dump. The prison opened in the 1930s. In 1957, it wasn’t half as big as it is today, so a DC-6A was able to crash-land after its LaGuardia takeoff and slide through a long field; inmates rescued the survivors. By the 1970s, its conditions werealready notorious: “Rikers Island—Tear It Down” was the headline in the fall 1970 issue of the radical feminist magazine ‘Battle Acts.’