The Brooklyn House of Detention and the Eric M. Taylor Center at Rikers Island, home to more than a thousand detainees combined, will soon close their doors.

Located along a commercial corridor, the Brooklyn House of Detention is home to 400 detainees. Since 1957, the jail has served as an admissions facility.

Now, the city will move everyone out, close the doors, and demolish the site.

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"We think this is a very positive step forward and obviously a very important step towards our plan to build borough-based facilities," said Liz Glazer, the director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice.

That means the city will make way for a new larger jail at the same location. It's all part of the administration's effort to close Rikers by 2026 and replace it with smaller facilities in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

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The city is also closing a jail on Rikers, known as EMTC. Built in 1964, it has a max capacity for 1,700 inmates. It currently houses 850 people serving sentences of a year or less.

It's a plan contingent on the city keeping its record-low crime rates and the jail population continuing to decrease, a change that is expected to kick into high gear in January when the state's bail reform goes into full effect. City officials project the jail population to be no more than 3,300 people by 2026. It currently stands at 6,877 people, down from a high of more than 21,000 in 1991.

"The new bail reform will have very significant effect on our jail population, simply because judges are not permitted to set bail or detain whole section of people they have been so far," Glazer said. "We anticipate there will be a very big decline starting now, really."

Detainees at these two facilities will be reassigned throughout other jails. Officials said none of the Brooklyn detainees will be placed on Rikers. There will be no staff layoffs as a result of the closures.

The Brooklyn House of Detention is expected to close by January. The Eric Taylor Center at Rikers Island will close by March.

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