){kind=small}
The upper lefthand part of the building held 12 cells for condemned men, while 6 cells were reserved for women on the second floor. The execution chamber was in the lower right.
Sing Sing Death House (former)
© Google Maps
© Bing Maps
By skyeye @ 2012-10-24 17:28:22
The long rectangles running down the left side and across the top are the west and east death row wings, each housing twelve men. (Women had a separate bank of three cells, and there were also hospital cells elsewhere in the building.) You can see notches in the outer walls of the death rwo wings, which appear to be the locations of the partitions between the twelve cells.
Across a corridor from the cells, on the opposite sides facing into the center, were windows. These looked in on exercise yards, which have since been roofed over. (They have the 12 ventilation ports on the roofs.) I believe the small rectangle at the left was the women's exercise yard. The facility was laid out so that every cell got sunlight for some time every day.
The roughly quadrilateral structure in the center is the six pre-execution cells, usually called the Dance Hall. You can see the outline of the cell walls running in a shallow 'V;, from SW to NE.
Running SE from the center of those cells is the corridor leading to the actual death room, which is in the top half of the square buiding to the lower right. The corridor was an above-ground passageway with windows looking out on the exercise yards, and the death chamber was in a more or less separate building, isolated by the famous three doors in the 'last mile' corridor.
You can still see a faint color difference in the roof, which delineates the border between the actual death room to the north, and the executioner's booth and morgue, side by side to the south. The rectangular structure on the roof is the skylight which was directly over the electric chair. The executioner's booth was to the lower left, and I believe the tiny rectangular building on the south side housed the generator or other electrical apparatus. The driveway beside it, at the south, probably corresponds to the morgue door. Witnesses would enter through a door on the east wall of the death chamber, directly facing the chair.