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Charles Street Jail (Suffolk County Jail)

215 Charles Street, West End

The Charles Street Jail opened in 1851 as a facility that housed arrestees awaiting trial within Suffolk County. The building employed a reform-minded style which allowed for natural light and ventilation within the structure to provide an adequate quality of life for inmates. Over its many decades of existence, the jail held not only those accused of common crimes, but also many arrested for political reasons—including numerous women who demonstrated support for the suffrage amendment by protesting President Woodrow Wilson’s visit to Boston in 1919. Its better-known prisoners included Malcolm Little (Malcolm X), Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, prisoners from two German U-boats during World War I, and William R. Baird Jr., a birth control activist.

Suffragists protest President Woodrow Wilson outside the Charles Street Jail, February 1919. Source: Historic New England.

In 1971, inmates sued the Suffolk County Sheriff and the Massachusetts Commissioner of Corrections for a violation of their constitutional rights due to the overcrowding in the jail. Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, best known for his desegregation decision (1974) in the Boston Public Schools, spent the night in the jail in 1973. His experience led him to declare the jail’s conditions unconstitutional and to order its closing. It wasn’t until 1990, however, that the jail closed and the prisoners were transferred to a new facility, the Suffolk County Jail, on Nashua Street.

What was the Charles Street Jail is now part of the Liberty Hotel, a luxury hotel owned by Massachusetts General Hospital and a site on the National Registry of Historic Places. The ironically named facility is centered around the jail’s circular rotunda surrounded by several levels of catwalks that used to connect the jail cells to one another; they now act as hallways between guestrooms, meeting rooms, and the hotel’s high-end restaurants and bars—ones with names such as Clink and the Alibi.

The Liberty Hotel Boston, former Charles Street Jail. Photo by Eleni Macrakis, August 2014.

Getting there:

Red Line to Charles/MGH Station. The site is across the street from the station.

To learn more:

Boniface, Russell. “Breaking Out of Jail.” The News of America’s Community of Architects. Volume 14, October 12, 2007.

“Liberty Hotel History.” The Liberty Hotel: A Luxury Collection Hotel, Boston.

Inmates of Suffolk County Jail v. J Kearney. 928 F 2d 33 (1991).

Walton, Krista. “Free at Last: A remarkable restoration transformed Boston’s notorious Charles Street Jail into the sparkling Liberty Hotel.” Preservation (September/October 2009).

Photo credit:

The photo, titled “Entrance to Suffolk County Jail,” at the top of the entry is from September 11, 1964. Source: Brearley Collection, Arts Department, Boston Public Library, via Digital Commonwealth.

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Charlestown State Prison/Bunker Hill Community College

250 New Rutherford Avenue, Charlestown

In late January 1955, four prisoners, following a botched escape attempt, held hostage five guards and numerous fellow inmates in the “Cherry Hill” section of the Charlestown State Prison. With the prison surrounded by police and National Guard troops, the armed prisoners surrendered after three-and-a-half days. However, they succeeded in having their grievances about the institution’s inhumane conditions and the state-wide penal system heard by a “citizens committee” charged with negotiating with them. The committee’s seven members agreed to work to improve prison conditions across the state, thus helping to bring to a peaceful end to what was then the second-longest prison insurrection in U.S. history.

Charlestown State Prison, 1900. Public domain.

In its report on the 85-hour stand-off, Time described Charlestown State Prison as “a cramped compound of blackened granite and dilapidated brick buildings” The newsweekly went on to characterize it as “the oldest, most disreputable prison in the U.S.”—it opened in 1805—and as a place “damned for 80 years as a verminous pesthole, unfit for human habitation.” Condemned by the state in 1876, it had replaced the state’s prison at Fort Independence on South Boston’s Castle Island, standing on a five-acre site in what then known as the Lynde Point section of Charlestown. In 1946-1948, Malcolm Little (later known as Malcolm X) was incarcerated there.

Over its years, the prison was the site of 61 executions, employing, beginning in 1901, the electric chair. Sacco and Vanzetti, who spent their last days in the same Sugar Hill cell block that saw the 1955 insurrection, were its most famous victims, executed on August 23, 1927. On May 9, 1947, the last state executions in Massachusetts took place in Charlestown State Prison: those of Phillip Bellino and Edward Gertso.

Police guarding the entrance to Charlestown State Prison. 22 August 1927, in anticipation of protests of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Source: Boston Public Library/Digital Commonwealth.

In 1955, Massachusetts closed Charlestown State Prison, moving the incarcerated men to facilities in Norfolk and Walpole, and tore it down. Since 1973, the site has been the home of Bunker Hill Community College. There is no visible marker on the campus indicating what once stood in its place.

Getting there:

Take the Orange Line to the Community College station and follow the signs for Bunker Hill Community College.

To learn more:

“Citizens Committee Settles Charlestown Prison Riot,” Daily Boston Globe, January 22, 1955: 5.

“Oldest Prison in U. S., Condemned in 1876,” Daily Boston Globe, January 19, 1955: 11.

“The Siege of Cherry Hill,” Time, Vol. 65, Issue 5, January 31, 1955.

O’Neil, Helen. “Where Sacco, Vanzetti and Malcolm X Stayed in Charlestown.” Charlestown Patch. March 6, 2012.

“Past Events.” Charlestown Historical Society website.