11.17.07
Jail Chic
Last Saturday night, my friends convinced me to actually go out, notwithstanding my money woes (they have a great way of offering to buy rounds and then never giving me a chance to buy the next one). And our destination was the hottest new spot in Boston, where all the pro athletes and townie celebrities hang out - jail. Well, sort of. In reality, it is the “Liberty Hotel,” a luxury four-star hotel on Charles St. But it is the renovated site of the infamous Charles Street Jail. The jail was built in the mid-nineteenth century and served as the one-time “home” for the likes of Sacco and Venzetti and John Michael Curley. Perhaps most famously, in 1973, inmates sued the sheriff and others, claiming that pretrial detainees were being held in unconstitutional conditions. And the federal court agreed, holding:
“As a facility for the pretrial detention of presumptively innocent citizens, Charles Street Jail unnecessarily and unreasonably infringes upon their most basic liberties, among them the rights to reasonable freedom of motion, personal cleanliness, and personal privacy. The court finds and rules that the quality of incarceration at Charles Street is ‘punishment’ of such a nature and degree that it cannot be justified by the state’s interest in holding defendants for trial, and therefore it violates the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The court ordered that a new jail be built by 1976, but (after a lot more litigation), the Charles St Jail didn’t actually close until 1990, after seventeen more years worth of suffering for its inmates. And now, perversely, it’s the city’s hottest night spot and most luxurious hotel.
The weirdest part about it is that it isn’t just a hotel with trendy bars. The restaurant is called “Clink” and the bar is “Alibi.” And remnants of the building’s past remain:
These are the ghosts, the half-perceived evidence of the old cells, which you can make out as puzzling patterns on the floor or the walls. There are teasing traces of old brick and metal, handsome exposed wood truss work that holds up the dome, a few remaining cell bars….Too often they yell at you that you’re, hey, in what used to be a jail. Restaurant tables cuddle up to bricks and bars. Interiors are blatant and often hideous. (Interior furnishings and finishes were designed by Champalimaud & Associates, of New York.) Knock-your-eye-out, boldly patterned murals, carpets, and furnishings leap at you from otherwise gloomy surfaces. Huge murals of silhouetted trees are supposed to make you think of freedom outdoors. A floor mosaic by artist Coral Bourgeois might seem delightful somewhere else, but because it consists entirely of cartoony icons of prison life, it strikes you as yet another in-your-face commercial for the jailness of the Liberty.
The drink menu is even filled with cocktails named after “people who tend to get you in trouble.”
I guarantee you that the Saturday night line to get in would not be over an hour at 11:30pm if this was just a new hotel. The intrigue lies in this “Ooh, I’m going to jail!” kitsch. And I find it both fascinating and somewhat repulsive, as I obviously spend a lot of time in real jails and know not only how unpleasant they are, but also that such a gimmick is rather disrespectful to all those people who were locked up there under horrible conditions and how many people continue to be so in facilities elsewhere.
Whether I will be able to appreciate the place in actuality remains to be seen - we refused to wait in line for so long on a cold night. So perhaps on an evening when it is not so in-demand, I will be able to report back on drinking in a luxury jail.
SaucyVixen said,
November 20, 2007 at 9:01 am
The awesome part?
Before it was a luxury hotel, but after it was the Charles Street Jail, it was an Emerson College dormitory.
Go Emerson!