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LIKE A FAIRYTALE mansion, it bulks above nondescript neighbors. It was built to resemble London's Old Bailey courthouse. Its corridors were scenes of decades of human drama. Now, wrapped in scaffolding, it is being converted into apartments for rich people, a wealthy enclave on the raffish outskirts of Little Italy.
The city's ornate old copper-domed police headquarters at 240 Centre St., vacated 13 years ago after 65 years of service and a raucously memorable going-out-of-business street party, resounds now to the clatter of construction. But it still holds memories.
Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward, a plastic construction-worker hat on his head, stood amid the builders' litter a couple of weeks ago and reminisced about what the old commissioner's office looked like.
"It was like walking into another century when you came into this office," he said, gazing at exposed beams and columns.
Ward's historical allusion might have been off by a few years. The office was a Victorian room, 16 by 22 feet, paneled in dark oak, with a 16-foot ceiling. It would have been an appropriately grandiose setting for Theodore Roosevelt (commissioner from 1885 to 1887) except that he had gone on to become president, leaving only his desk behind.
Other accommodations were less ornate. There were 31 six-by-10-foot steel-mesh cells in the cellar, with snap-up bunks that could be sprung against the wall to permit, said a contemporary architectural assessment, "abundant room for exercise." In there from time to time were such notables as Legs Diamond, Two-Gun Francis Crowley and Gyp the Blood.
"Where the wagons pulled up to unload," recalled Patrick Murphy, who retired from the department last year as first deputy commissioner, "you used to see a woman by the door. I don't know exactly what she did there, but when you brought them in, you'd always hear her say, `Ah, the...