occinteriordesign

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

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Street_Jail

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://law.jrank.org/pages/1776/Prisons-History-Auburn-plan.html

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridley_James_Fox_Bryant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Seven_Associates

http://www.c7a.com/work/the-liberty-hotel

http://www.annbeha.com/portfolio/public-realm

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/5812