In my view, "Newgate" would be the perfect home for the clintons. Erected in rural country ("pleasant, airy, and salubrious," as Thomas Eddy called the site in his 1801 book), Newgate was located about two miles above City Hall in what is now Greenwich Village. (Selling point: Hillary-as-Giuliani-irritant is inversely proportional to distance of clinton abode from City Hall.) Construction was begun in the summer of 1796 and finished in late 1797.  On four acres overlooking the Hudson River, the Doric-style building is of two stories with a cupola, surrounded by a stone wall ranging from 14 to 23 feet high. It contains 54 12-by-18-foot rooms designed for eight persons each; there are also 14 single rooms, eight feet by six feet and 14-foot high, with windows eight feet from the floor, for a total capacity of 446 occupants. A large room for a chapel was set aside, as were living quarters for the keeper and his family. Another two-story building of brick, 200 feet long by 20 feet wide, contains the work-shops. There is also a garden "in excellent order," as Eddy wrote. The entire cost of the grounds, buildings, and a wharf on the river-front was originally $208,846. The first 'residents' arrived Nov.28, 1797.
Caveat emptor! The clintons would be wrong to automatically equate the creepingly leftist location and incipiently leftist penal code of New York's first state prison with suitability. Although Newgate was the embodiment of a new, "more enlightened" penal code--prior to Newgate, 16 crimes were punishable by death in New York, including murder, rape, robbery, treason, burglary, the taking of goods from a church, forgery and counterfeiting--it must be emphasized that treason and murder were retained as capital offenses as were all other felonies, if committed a second time. Truth-in-advertising compels me to disclose that Newgate no longer exists. But this small detail should pose absolutely no problem for the clintons and their promiscuous campaigns, all of which being, after all, mock documentaries about non-entities, the paradoxical personification of nothingness.
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