The Liberty Hotel,
Boston, MA.
By Greta Ridley
Let’s talk innovation, preservation, renovation and
reinvention. In the heart of Boston,
Massachusetts, sits a national historic landmark at the base of Beacon
Hill. This building, located at 215
Charles St., has been an architectural gem from its conception in 1848 as the
Charles Street Jail to its modern-day transformation into the four-star luxury retreat,
The Liberty Hotel.
PHOTO #1 – Charles Street
Jail, 1932
PHOTO #2 – The Liberty
Hotel, 2010 – visible in this photo, left and rear of the jailhouse, is the
16-story modern redbrick-faced addition that houses the majority of guest rooms
and some amenities
“Industry, obedience, and silence” are words not commonly
associated with luxury nor hotels. A
hotel is a place people come to for freedom from the mundane, not for an
administration-controlled experience with a looming expectation of total
obedience. A hotel is a place people
come to for relaxation or perhaps supreme tranquility, though that rarely means
absolute silence. A hotel is a place
people come to for indolence and idleness, and even during business travel
people aren’t looking for industry in the sense implied by the aforementioned
motto. “Industry, obedience, and silence”, however, form the actual, literal
foundation of The Liberty Hotel, though few may know, let alone realize why.
In 1816, the Auburn system was implemented in New York as a
prison model and regime based upon these three principles. Boston clergyman and Yale-educated penologist
Reverend Louis Dwight believed the Auburn Plan to be ‘a model worthy of the
world’s imitation’ and his influence led to the creation of the Charles Street
Jail. Rev. Dwight advised architect
Gridley James Fox Bryant on his plans for the jail following the Auburn Plan. Constructed between 1848-1851, the Charles
Street Jail was built in the form of a cross with four wings extending from a
central octagonal rotunda, allowing for prisoners to be segregated accordingly by
gender and interned offense. The Auburn
Plan meant construction of tiny individual cells, 220 in the case of Charles
Street, and workshops, and a system of enforced silence and harsh punishments
for the prisoners who were known by numbers only and forced to move in
militaristic lockstep manner in all areas beyond their 8’ x 10’ cells. Imagining criminals walking through the
current lobby of the Liberty Hotel is hard to imagine without a little ‘before
the magic’ visualization.
PHOTO # 3 – Charles Street Jail, view of the rotunda,
2002
PHOTO #4 – The Liberty Hotel, 2009
G. J. F. Bryant was widely considered Boston’s most
accomplished architect of the time.
Bryant was a champion of Boston’s “Granite Style” and built the Charles
Street Jail with Quincy granite from Quincy, Mass., the site of the first
railroad in the United States. Bryant
was an innovator. Shown above is a
sampling of the 30 wrought-iron latticed arched windows, each 3-stories-high
and crowned with jointed wedge-shaped stone voussoirs (vaults popular in French
design). These windows were said at the
time to yield light “four times as great as that in any prison yet
constructed.” And below you can see two
of the four circular wood ‘ocular’ windows housed in the octagonal atrium of
the lobby or central building.
PHOTO #5 – The Liberty
Hotel, 2010
As a pinnacle, Bryant’s original design also called for a dramatic
cupola (essentially a weatherproof oculus) at the top of the 90-foot-tall
atrium to allow further light and ventilation into the cruciform-shaped jail. Unfortunately, to save time and money when
the jail was initially built, the cupola was severely reduced in size and later
removed altogether in 1949. Which brings
us to the modern-day renovation, in 2007, when the team of restorers decided to
rebuild Bryant’s original vision. The
new cupola, a series of wood tresses and steel beams is a work of art.
PHOTO
#6 – Looking upward at the cupola
PHOTO #7 – The Liberty
Hotel Atrium, 2010 – showing the rebuilt cupola, an ocular window, a 3-story
iron-latticed window, newly designed catwalks, refurbished interior brickwork,
and 4-star luxury interior with wrought iron chandeliers and naturalistic
murals
So who is responsible for this transformation? The $150-million refurbishment was a
collaborative team effort by multiple Massachusetts-based firms. Developer Carpenter & Company has been a
developer, owner, and manager of real estate since 1898 and holds a resume of
many diverse projects. Architect
Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc., or C7A, was founded in 1962 and has since
been producing buildings that educate about conservation and respect for the
environment through scheme and content.
C7A has an extensive portfolio of aquariums, museums, educational
buildings and exhibits, hospitality locations, hospitals and government
buildings. With LEED-accredited
professionals on their team, C7A strives to lead in green design and total
building system integration, and sustainable projects. C7A won 13 awards for The Liberty Hotel
project alone. Also fundamental in the
reinvention of the Charles Street Jail was preservation professional Ann Beha
Architects. ABA seeks “a dynamic
discourse between heritage and the future” and has become over the last 30
years a leader in preservation projects throughout the United States and
abroad. The large-scale development at
Charles Street also required extensive cooperation with the Massachusetts
Historical Commission, the Boston Landmarks Commission, the National Park
Service, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
The Liberty Hotel opened its doors at the end of 2007 as a
full service hotel with 298 guest rooms (most located within the 16-story
modern addition attached to the original structure), 6,000 square feet of
meeting space with a conference facility, individual meeting rooms, and a
ballroom, health club, private “guests only” lounge, and five food and beverage
outlets catering to the youthful urbanites of Beacon Hill and travelers alike. With names like ‘The Yard’, an outdoor dining
area, ‘Scampo’, an Italian Fusion restaurant named for the Italian word meaning
“escape”, ‘Alibi Bar’ and ‘The Clink’, a bar and lounge placed in the jail’s
former ‘drunk tank’; the designers paid homage to the building’s historic
significance as the one-time ‘home’ of incarcerated persons including Malcolm X
and Frank Abagnale Jr. If you recognize the name but can’t quite place why, Leonardo
DiCaprio portrayed the infamous and enthusiastically hard-to-catch counterfeiter
in “Catch Me If You Can”.
PHOTO #8 – “The Clink”
A tantalizing balance was struck within; where every facet
of contemporized design counters and complements the traditional and
antiquated. The reception desk is
reminiscent of 1850s embroidery work custom crafted of ebonized wood with
lacquered stenciled patterns. Another example
of artistic modernization is an elaborate 19’ tile mural by Coral Bourgeois
between the up and down escalators in the hotel lobby and central atrium. Coral Bourgeois was also commissioned for two
murals within The Alibi Bar.
PHOTO #9 – The arrivals
lobby at The Liberty Hotel
PHOTO #10 – Close-up of
tile mural between up and down escalators; lobby/atrium
PHOTO #11 – A tile mural
by Coral Bourgeois within The Alibi Bar
Other contemporary elements include striped carpet inserts
throughout the elevator lobbies and guest corridors in a burgundy and black
color scheme that correlates to the main hotel atrium. The hallway wall-coverings are intermittent
vertical segments of an organic form similar to dandelion or thistle; creeping
and weaving around itself, as ivy, from floor to ceiling, these artistic pieces
in black on a creamy background are suggestive of an austere yet elegant
jailhouse tattoo.
PHOTO #12 & 13 – Carpet and
wallcovering in corridors
PHOTO #14 – Wallcovering detail
The guestrooms in both the tower addition and the original
prison building are all decorated to continue the marriage of contemporary and
traditional. The color palette
throughout lightly varies with pale rose, taupe, and off-whites with bold
burgundy, smoky gray and black accents delicately placed. Furnished in dark mahogany woods with chrome
fittings and fixtures, sepia-toned artwork and the chance frosted glass accent
piece, every room is outfitted with up-to-date technology including LCD HD TVs,
VoIP telephones, and mp3 docks. The
bathrooms are all streamlined granite and glass with separate stall showers and
soaker tubs; supplied with chic Molton Brown toiletries, luxurious towels and
robes sporting the signature ocular window branding.
PHOTO #15 – Guestroom in
original prison building
PHOTO #16 – Liberty Hotel
Ocular Logo
Perhaps my favorite feature of this entire jail-to-hotel
transformation is a simple yet impactful piece of marketing. For the grand opening of the hotel, a design,
advertising, and merchandise agency, Anthem Branding, was commissioned to
create custom replica prison keys. Each
was carved with “1851 The Charles Street Jail Boston” and after the event these
keys became the guest privacy signs stating “solitary” in lieu of the standard
“do not disturb” placards common in other establishments.
PHOTO #17 – Solitary Key
Every detail is worthy of appreciation from the granite
structure to the ornamental details both reclaimed and invented. The conversion of the Charles Street Jail
into the lavish Liberty Hotel has been a marvel. I look forward to the day that I get to see
this stone treasure myself!!
RESOURCES
Continental.com/Magazine
– Jan. 2011 (Explore / Hotels & Must-Haves)
Meetings
Focus – August 2012 – “Revising History” by Rayna Katz
Departures
– Mar/Apr 2012 – “Hotels with History” by Marnie Hanel
MSNBC
– Budget Travel – “Hotels worth your tax refund”
The New York Times – Business – May
25, 2010 – Itineraries – “Just Steps From the Room: Hotels Add Wine-Tastings,
Book Readings, Music and Chats” by Julie Weed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/5812
10:49 AM
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