Skim the board listing and this reads like a hospital renovation. Read the bid documents and a different building shows up. NYC Health + Hospitals is reclassifying floors 9 and 10 of Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn to H1 occupancy — the code for detention space — building 144 secure beds behind it, with monitoring panels wired into the Department of Correction's own Central Control room. Whatever the plans call it, a contractor bidding this job is bidding a detention unit that happens to sit inside a hospital tower.
The job is Package 3 of Woodhull's Outposted Therapeutic Housing Units project — interior fit-out and rooftop recreation, at 760 Broadway in Brooklyn, carried on our board as solicitation H&H 72202001. Bids close September 30 at 11 a.m. Get this straight first: the mandatory pre-bid walkthrough already happened. The solicitation's own terms bar any firm that didn't send someone — no exceptions in the documents reviewed. If your firm missed it, this one isn't yours to chase.
“A GC without one of those three already on the team, or a documented equal ready to prove it, doesn't have a bid.”
Three addenda tell you how contested this job's details got. Addendum 1 (July 7) revised the spec volumes and bid-breakdown form. Addendum 2 (July 29) pushed the closing from September 3 to September 30 and raised the subcontracting cap from 75% to 85% — worth knowing if you're leaning on a specialty sub for the hardest scope. Addendum 3, 273 pages issued August 21, answers 175 numbered RFIs from trade contractors and reissues the full drawing set. It also made one real design change, not just a clarification: the civil plans dropped a healing garden shown on the original site drawings and replaced it with a stormwater detention tank and planter, driven by DOB coordination.
The core contract terms held steady through all three addenda. Liquidated damages run $2,000 a day past the 634-day completion clock — the contract calls it compensation, not a penalty. Insurance minimums are steep: $25 million per occurrence, $50 million aggregate, well above a standard NYC public job. That alone rules out some GCs before they open the spec book.
The scope explains the terms. This is ligature-resistant curtains and buffers, attack-rated mesh behind the drywall, ballistic-rated glazing, and a detention door-and-hardware package built around the Southern Folger product family. Buried in the general provisions for detention work is the sentence that actually gates this bid: only three firms are named as acceptable equipment suppliers — CML Security, Maximum Security Products Corp. (ModCorr), and Cornerstone Inc. — each needing 20-plus years and 30 comparable completed jobs.
Size-wise: two floors at roughly 37,000 square feet apiece, split into 16- to 20-bed private-room housing units and 18-bed dorm units, plus a full fit-out of the ground- and second-floor vehicular sally port and an enclosed rooftop recreation yard on steel trusses over floor 11. Four existing elevator cars are getting modernized to 500 feet per minute and reorganized from a three-car group into two DOC-controlled duplex groups; two brand-new dedicated cars serve only the secure path from the sally port to the upper floors.
Two things before you commit anything to this bid. First, confirm you're holding the Package 3 documents specifically — Woodhull's OTxHU project has moved through City Record in at least four separate packages this year, more than one sharing a version of the same base project number. Second, if you're not already talking to a DOC-experienced detention-equipment sub, start now — that relationship, not your hospital-GC resume, is what gets you through this bid. M/WBE goal is 30%; the H+H Project Labor Agreement applies. This package moving to bid is the clearest sign yet that Rikers-related capacity is actually leaving the drawing board.