Historic Boston: The Liberty Hotel

Bostonist loves when it when booze and history are combined. We’ve been known to spend afternoons watching Drunk History videos on YouTube and to sweep the history category at trivia night. But if you told us two years ago that we’d be able to knock back a few drinks in a formerly infamous and historically significant jail … well, we’d think that maybe you’d had a few too many yourself.

This brings us to the Liberty Hotel - a super swanky, luxury hotel located on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. Before it opened as a hotel in September 2007, this imposing building was formerly the Charles Street Jail. Yeah, a jail. Constructed between 1848 and 1851, this jail was designed to be most humanitarian for its prisoners, with large windows for ventilation and light, and four separate wings, which allowed prisoners to be segregated by sex and category of offense. The jail housed a number of famous individuals: Sacco and Vanzetti, Malcolm X, and Mayor James Curley. The jail was closed due to overcrowding in the mid-1970s.

The rehabilitation that resulted in the Liberty Hotel cost a whopping $150 million, and the building maintains many characteristics of the original building, including vestiges of original jail cells near the lobby bar. The hotel features a number of restaurants, and they even have free yoga on Saturday mornings. It’s pretty far from serving its original purpose, but if you hang around the bar long enough, you still may find yourself in a bit of trouble…