In tune with Sing Sing

Press, 9 December 1983, Page 20

In tune with Sing Sing

“When you tell people you’re from Ossining, they usually ask, ‘Where’s that’?” says George Watson, who has lived in the town for more than 40 years. “But the minute you say it’s where Sing Sing is located,” he adds, “their eyes light up and their heads start shaking with acknowledgement.” It was exactly that kind of name recognition that prompted residents to change the village’s name from Sing Sing to Ossining in 1901. They felt that their community was too closely associated with the penal colony; that the electrocutions carried out at the prison disgraced the village’s name. Products “Made in Sing Sing” were widely thought to be produced by convict labour and were not welcomed on the open market. The attempt at dissociation lasted until 1970, when the State renamed the prison the Ossining Correctional Facility — after the renamed village. Now, the Ossining Village Board

has asked the State Department of Correctional Services to change the name of the prison back to Sing Sing. Last week officials in Albany approved the change.

In seeking the change, village officials and residents said they were not trying to dissociate the village again from its most notorious institution. Quite the opposite. Many said they hoped they would be able to use the Sing Sing name to attract tourists.

“Our history is tied to that prison,” says Stephen Tavano, a village trustee who comes from a fourth generation of Ossining families and is a nephew of James Sullivan, the prison’s superintendent. “It is the most popular site we have here in Ossining, and I’d like to see it become a tourist attraction. I never understood why the State changed the name in the first place.” For that matter, neither did a lot

By

LENA WILLIAMS,

“New York Times”

of people in Albany who, according to Louis Ganim, a spokesman for Thomas A. Coughlin, the Commissioner of Correction, were “more than happy” to accede to the wishes of the villagers. Edward Wheeler, a former Mayor of Ossining, does not think the name change is “Going to make a bit of difference,” as far as the village is concerned. “No-on? here ever stopped calling it Sing Sing,” says Mr Wheeler, who owns a stationery store on Main Street. “The people here aren’t as disturbed by the prison as some may think.” The relationship between the village and the prison, though uneasy in decades past, has improved in recent years, residents say. Inmates from the prison have worked on two community projects, painting a church and doing some concrete work at the Ossining Volunteer Ambulance Corps.