Newgate Prison (also known as the Old Bailey after the street on which it stands) now stands upon its site. The original door from a prison cell used to house St. Oliver Plunkett in 1681 is on display at St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, Ireland. The original iron gate leading to the gallows was used for decades in an alleyway in Buffalo, New York, USA and is currently housed in that city at Canisius College. Other famous prisoners at Newgate include: The phrase "[as] black as Newgate's knocker" is a Cockney reference to the door knocker on the front of the prison.
History of United States prison systems first of the United States to institute solitary confinement for incarcerated convicts. After 1790, those sentenced to hard labor in Pennsylvania were moved indoors to an inner block of solitary cells in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail. New York began implementing solitary living quarters at New York City's Newgate Prison in 1796. From the efforts at the Walnut Street Jail and Newgate Prison, two competing systems of imprisonment emerged in the United States by the 1820s. The "Auburn" (or "Congregate System") emerged from New York's prison of the same name between 1819 and 1823. And the "Pennsylvania" (or "Separate System") emerged