How many visitors to Boston can say they paid to sleep in a jail cell?
Okay, former jail cell.
Beantown’s newly opened Liberty Hotel was once home to some of the city’s most notorious prisoners. Now, for $320 a night (minimum) you can catch some zzz’s near iron-railing balconies where guards used to stand watch over inmates more than 100 years ago.
What a difference a few decades can make. The 156-year-old stone structure is now home to a luxury hotel—the product of a 5-year, $150 million renovation. And you can forget about looking for remnants of dingy décor, the hotel, which sits at the foot of Boston’s upscale Beacon Hill neighborhood, epitomizes high-class accommodations. The $5,500 presidential suite proves it. And so does the hotel’s current clientele, which includes some of Hollywood’s biggest names such as Mick Jagger, Annette Bening, Meg Ryan and Eva Mendes.
It’s quite a change from the folks who once called the place home. The jail’s former “guests” included Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, who served time for fraud in 1904 after he took a civil service exam for a friend; Frank Abagnale Jr., a 1960s con artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie “Catch Me If You Can;” and group of thieves who pulled off one of Boston’s most infamous crimes—-the Great Brinks Robbery in 1950.
According to hotel executives, architects took great pains to preserve features of the original structure while trying not to remind guests too much of the jail’s dark past. Eighteen of the hotel’s 298 rooms are built in the original jail. And while those rooms feature the jail’s original brick walls, they also include high-definition TVs, marble counter tops, spa tubs, 500-thread count sheets, and down comforters. The remaining rooms, which are just as luxurious, were built in a new 16-story tower.
The hotel also boasts two new restaurants, Scampo, which is Italian for “escape” and Clink, where diners can look through original bars from cell doors and windows as they enjoy multi-course meals featuring items such as smoked lobster bisque or citrus poached prawns. Waiters and waitresses don shirts with prison numbers and libations flow at the hotel bar, Alibi, which was built in the jail’s former drunk tank.
I think it’s a clever concept. Though, it makes me wonder how the jail’s former inmates feel about tourists spending upwards of $5,000 to spend the night where they paid their debt to society.
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