Welcome to the Clink, Care for a Drink?

Sept. 5, 2007 — -- When you think of going to the slammer, the hoosegow, the joint, you probably think of grim accommodations like those seen in the movie "Shawshank Redemption."

But when you arrive at what used to be the Charles Street Jail in Boston, it is a completely different experience.

"I want people to have a gasp. I want people to have a, 'Oh my golly, this is amazing,'" said Dick Friedman, the developer and co-owner of what is now the Liberty Hotel, which was converted from the jail that formerly housed high-profile Boston criminals.

The hotel had its grand opening today, and Friedman says it has been a long road from lockup to luxury.

"This jail held people for a couple hundred years in horrible confinement and unpleasant situations, and to say the Liberty is now freed, it's like the doves flying away," Friedman said.

First opened in 1851, the jail held famous criminals like accused anarchists Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Boston strangler Albert DeSalvo and Boston icon, mayor-convict James Michael Curley.

This week, in the jail's new Liberty Hotel incarnation, some of the guests included Meg Ryan, Eva Mendes and Annette Benning.

What they are seeing is a jail transformed — a $150 million project with traces of the old mixed with the new.

The old jail cells were tiny, and an outline of the cells' boundaries is still visible on the floors. What was once a small space that contained four inmates and a toilet is now in the middle of a chic restaurant called Clink.

The minibars are called "personal contraband," and the menus have "Warden's warnings."

And the old catwalks, where guards would keep their eyes on the prisoners, are preserved as balconies where guests can keep their own lookout.

"It's good people watching," Friedman said. "It was always good people watching."

All of the rooms at the Liberty have Internet access and all the other perks a $350-a-night hotel room should have.

The Liberty is the first jail-turned-luxury-hotel in the United States.

"At the time it was built, it wasn't considered to be pretty. It was just considered to be the way you did things. You did things with care and thought and great craftsmanship," Pam Hawkes, a preservation architect, said of the original Charles Street Jail.

And what about some of the former guests of the historic building?

"They are welcome if they can pay," Friedman said.