Victorian Jail Granted New Life in 21st Century

Decommissioned and derelict for almost two decades, Boston’s historic Charles Street Jail, an austere but elegant riverside landmark in the shadow of Beacon Hill, reopened in September following a $150 million preservation, restoration and renovation project.


However, the revitalized jail will not house a single prisoner condemned by a jury of his peers, but will instead welcome paying guests with equal measures of historic regard, contemporary design and modern appointment as it assumes a new lease on life to match its new name: the Liberty Hotel.


Composed of two distinct structural elements, the Liberty offers 18 brick-walled guest rooms fashioned from former cellblocks in the original building. The development also encompasses a new 16-story tower, which houses 280 guest rooms, adjacent to the original jail structure.


Proposed by Boston Mayor Martin Brimmer, who was instrumental in the correctional facility’s planning and development according to the Auburn plan for inmate detention, the jail accepted its first inmates in 1851.


From 19th century anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti to four-time mayor of Boston and convicted fraudster James Curley to “Catch me if You Can” forger and erstwhile FBI consultant Frank Abagnale Jr. to alleged 1960s Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo and even Malcolm X, the classic granite, cruciform edifice from a bygone era of corrections boasts a history replete with a host of high-profile inmates.








(Above) A free-standing door frame is all that remains of the imposing Charles Street Jail perimeter walls that dwarfed passing Bostonians for some 150 years. (Below) Guests at the Liberty can look forward to more than gruel at the hotel’s Clink bar and restaurant.
Originally designed by leading local architect Gridley Fox Bryant in consultation with renowned Yale penologist and reformer Rev. Louis Dwight, the jail’s innovative design concepts, hidden from passing Bostonians behind Spartan, barb-wired brick perimeter walls, became a prototype for jailhouse design and prison architecture throughout the world during the latter half of the 19 th century.


However, after nearly 100 years of operation the U.S. District Court ruled in 1973 that conditions at the jail violated the constitutional rights of inmates. Although several renovation plans were developed for the facility, none gained the approval of the city council and a new jail was eventually designed and constructed several blocks from the Charles Street site.


In 1990, the last inmates were moved from the Charles Street Jail to the new Suffolk County Jail on Nashua Street and the Victorian landmark was abandoned to pigeons and cobwebs.


In light of the jail’s historic landmark status — Charles Street is listed on both the state and national registers of historic places — project architects Cambridge Seven Associates and Ann Beha Architects worked with historians and conservationists from the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the Boston Landmarks Commission, the National Parks Service and the Boston Redevelopment Authority to preserve the architectural integrity of the building. Boston firm Suffolk Construction managed general construction work on the project.


Constructed of granite blocks sourced from nearby Quincy , the buildings octagonal central component features four church-like, ocular wood-frame windows that alternate between four radiating wings to yield the structure’s classic cruciform footprint. Indicative of Bryant and Dwight’s progressive break with institutional design paradigms of the time, each wing incorporates three-story arched windows, articulated by wedge-shaped granite voussoirs evocative of medieval architecture.







WBUR’s David Boeri reports on the life and times of the Victorian landmark Charles Street Jail, with a rogue’s gallery of infamous inmates, and the Beantown jail’s 21st century transformation into a luxury hotel.


National Public Radio Boston affiliate WBUR


Presaging modern design trends toward the leveraging of natural daylighting, the large windows, vaulted ceilings and cupola were designed to infuse the building with an inherent sense of airiness and light. The arched-window components of each wing were estimated to deliver a significant increase in interior-space daylighting compared to other existing prison designs, officials say.


In an effort to re-establish Bryant’s aesthetic vision for the octagonal, cruciform structure, the design team drew inspiration, direction and concrete design ideas from the original 150-year-old architectural drawings. Several architectural components prominent in Bryant’s original design plans, such as a large cupola atop the central rotunda, were downsized or cut during the jail’s construction due to budgetary constraints. Those components, which was completely removed in the 1940s, were rebuilt for the hotel to the opulent scale of Bryant’s original design.


As evidenced in the recreation of the cupola to match the proportions and light-infusing effects of Bryant’s original plans, the design team was eager to preserve, exploit and showcase the proto-modern design elements of the Victorian jail throughout the Liberty Hotel’s public spaces. Cambridge Seven left the building’s façade fundamentally unchanged and also preserved the architectural integrity of central interior spaces.


Public spaces underscore the sense of grandeur that first embraces guests as they are transported — as much in time as in space — by an embankment of escalators from the hotel’s street-level entrance.


Prominent in the central embankment, a sweeping multi-textured tile mosaic by Coral Bougeois recalls scenes and personalities in a historical survey of crime and punishment, while a restored jail-cell façade supports a series of etched glass panels depicting the history of the jail facility.


The structure’s original rotunda, which soars almost 100 feet above what was in Victorian times an inmate exercise yard, has been recast in the 21 st -century industry of hospitality as an atrium, striking in its mélange of industrial and cathedralesque architectural notes, that crowns the hotel’s central lobby.


Punctuating the vaulted proportions of the atrium, wrought-iron catwalks encircle the exposed brick walls of the lobby and link public spaces. Echoing the structure’s cruciform configuration of radiating wings, four wrought-iron chandeliers, each 10 feet in diameter, double as navigational aids drawing guests to one of the hotel’s epicurean spaces, a 3,000-square-foot grand ballroom or upscale first-floor bar — formerly, the jail’s drunk tank.


Anchoring the central rotunda, the hotel reception area features striking granite in-lays that reprise the building’s stone façade, while concentric panels of ebonized mahogany with lacquered, stencil patterning act as a warming counterpoint. Richly hued in tones of yellow and purple, geometric carpeting, softens the dominant institutional bluestone flooring, while large-scale American colonial prints offset the stark Victorian brick- and iron-work and jolting iron-barred windows.


Separated by a quiet courtyard garden — where inmates once exercised limbs and ghosts as they trudged, weather permitting, in never-ending monotony — the development’s new 16-story tower counterpoises and complements its Victorian sibling with a predominance of glass and iron-spot brick construction. The tower’s expansive glass corners yield unfettered transparency and light in symbiotic opposition to the gray opaque solidity of the Quincy-granite jail to produce a harmonious architectural marriage of modernity and antiquity.


Appointed with rich mahogany paneling accented with stainless steel, the tower’s 300 guest rooms, which include 10 suites, range in size from 400 to 800 square feet and feature floor-to-ceiling windows that leverage natural light and offer uninterrupted cityscape views. The Liberty ‘s 2,200-square-foot presidential suite boasts a 305-square-foot terrace that affords exquisite vistas of the Charles River basin and historic Beantown neighborhoods beyond.


In addition to the Liberty’s full-service business center, a 24-hour health and fitness center caters to guests still attuned to any of the world’s time zones. All guest rooms feature HD-LCD flat-screen televisions and incorporate business-standard communication technologies within a fully converged digital network with VOIP telephone capabilities and high-speed wireless and scalable fiber connection capabilities.


The Liberty’s central building also incorporates a variety of conference and event rooms, which are designed to accommodate groups of between 10 and 120 people for meetings, and between 200 and 350 for formal dinners and receptions.


Unlike the inmates sentenced to lengthy stays all those years ago, however, guests checking in at reception this time around are free to come and go as they please — as long they part with between $300 and $5,500 for the privilege of over-nighting at the re-invented Charles Street Jail.