Diamond Pearson needed a new place to live and was looking for something with an industrial feeling. When Liberty Crest Apartments in Fairfax County, from, came in her online search, she was intrigued.
“I checked it and fell in love – the brick, the concrete floors – it was so beautiful,” said Mrs. Pearson, 32, who works at Fairfax County Schools. Every unit in the complex is unique, and she liked that too. Only when she signed the lease that someone said: “Did you know this is an old prison?”
Indeed, the development, now called Liberty, had a former life such as the Lorton Reformatory, a prisoners in the Washington prison, DC built in 1910, it is best known for the dozens of suffragists who were trapped there in hard and violent circumstances – Including forced circumstances – including forced circumstances – power supplies – after they were picked outside the White House.
The prison was closed in 2001 and the following year Fairfax County bought the 2,400 hectare site, including a farm and work areas where prisoners could learn transactions such as metalworking and carpentry, for $ 4.2 million. The province gradually turned the building into a park and golf course, three schools and a vast art center. In 2008, Het Graafschap started working together with the Alexander Company, a developer of Wisconsin with expertise in historical conservation and adaptive reuse, to convert former cell blocks and other buildings and build new structures. The complex now includes 165 apartments, 98 percent of which are rented, 157 city houses and 24 single -family homes, as well as commercial spaces. In 2017, tenants started to go into, many attracted by facilities such as a swimming pool, 24-hour gym and yoga room.
The first night in her new place was the most difficult, said Mrs. Pearson, who has been in her apartment with her son, Great -Britain, Nike, Nike, since 2022. “It was a bit creepy – I thought,” Wow, this was actually a prison, “but I adapted,” she said. “I think it's great. The architecture here, every piece, tells a story – every centimeter, every crack.
The entities responsible for the redevelopment – Fairfax County, The Alexander Company and ELM Street Development – worked closely with members of the community during the planning process. Local residents insisted on homes with mixed income and the developers made sure that around a quarter of the units were affordable for people who made 50 percent of the average income of the area. Market rates with two bedrooms are $ 1,600 to $ 2,500, which is approximately average in the area.
Community members also wanted to keep the character of the site. Built during the progressive era with a focus on rehabilitation, the colonial revival buildings of the prison bricks used the prisoners on the site while slept in tents until the structures were completed. Maintaining that character was also something that the developers themselves had given priority, partly to take advantage of tax credits granted to historic locations.
The redeveloped site contains some of the original signposting of the prison, as well as a museum that documents the past of the building. Named after the well -known suffragist Lucy Burns, who was locked up in Lorton, the museum shows agricultural techniques used by the early prisoners, as well as homemade weapons.
“I think they did pretty well to keep the historicity and integrity of the original design and the intention,” said Lynne Garvey-Hodge, a resident of Fairfax who was chairman of Fairfax's History Commission when the county bought the building . “I am very happy with it.”
The redevelopment of the Lorton Reformatory has become an example for cities throughout the country, because an increasing number of states are choosing to close some of their prisons.
In the last decades of the 20th century, the United States experienced a flourishing of prison buildings; More than 1,000 facilities were built from 1970 to 2000. Around 2010, however, the number of locked people began to take off, partly because of the reforms of the conviction and decriminalization of some drug -related offenses. Almost 200 national and federal correction facilities closed from 2000 to 2022.
In the state of New York alone, the prison population has fallen more than 50 percent since 1999. In November, two correction facilities closed in New York, in the provinces of Sullivan and Washington. These institutions join 24 other prisons in the state that have stopped activities for the past 13 years. Of these, some are reused in ways that will benefit their communities, but many are still empty.
The success stories include Warwick, NY, near the border between New Jersey, where the municipal government led the attempt to turn the correction facility in the middle of the Orange into a business campus and sports park. In Manhattan, the former Lincoln Correctional Facility is an affordable residential complex called Seneca. And in Fishkill, in the Hudson Valley, Conifer Realty recently bought the Downstate Correctional Facility site, a 100-hectare site that was closed in 2022. The company is planning to turn the complex into a development for mixed use with housing.
But Liberty and the complexes in New York are all in somewhat densely populated parts of the country. Many detention centers in rural regions, where most American prisons have been built in the last half century, have no customers. These facilities were often praised by local government officials in the hope that a prison would make jobs in the area. But when those detention centers, sometimes miles from a lively economic activity, are abandoned, companies are not often in line to open their companies there.
“There is a lack of consciousness that there can be a future for a closed prison that goes beyond imprisonment, a lack of imagination about where a closed prison location can be converted,” said Nicole Porter, senior director of Advocacy for the conviction project, a Non -profit organization that promotes fairness in the criminal justice system.
The group of Mrs. Porter, who encourages prison sentence, supports the re -use of the facilities so that they can never be used as prisons again.
Older prisons are often closer to urban centers, making them apparently better candidates for redevelopment. But in some cities, including Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville and Pittsburgh, vast complexes are empty because the redevelopment of a prison can be expensive, Mrs. Porter said.
The walls of prisons are thick, making them expensive to renovate. Or, as in the case of the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville-a castle-like structure built in 1898 by architect Samuel Patton-Is the building possibly full of asbestos.
And the redevelopment of these sites or now it concerns private mixed use or residential projects, or public-private efforts aimed at stimulating the local economy requirement resources and the involvement of many parties, including local residents.
Involvement of the community can mean that some plans never get off the ground, as is the case in Thomaston, Maine, where the 15 -hectare plot was the Maine State Prison, is still two decades after the prison is closed, because residents do not Have a moment over options for the property.
Despite the obstacles, civil servants know that redeveloped former prison sites can be catalysts for communities. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 on a prison repair committee to push closed locations towards reuse.
In Utah, the 600 -hectare site of a closed prison is redeveloped by Lincoln Property Company of Dallas and local companies together with the government. The prison of Utah was built 70 years ago in what was then a rural area, 20 miles south of Salt Lake City. The region grew around it, and today the building is in the most densely populated area of the state.
Almost ten years ago, an economic study emphasized the strategic value of the prison, so the state built a new prison to the west of the city and formed a land authority to guide the makeover of the older real estate.
A large part of the site has been destroyed. The plan is to make it a huge, dense development, called the point, which will last at least 15 years to complete. The state will possess the country and leads the process of building thousands of residential units and a train station and cycle paths to connect it with the rest of the area.
The building is close to universities and the fast -growing technical sector of Utah; The development will also house an innovation district, which aims to bring research institutions and companies in the neighborhood together. The Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox and legislative leaders broke the project of the project in December.
While Utah's prison starts, leaders in Michigan City, IND. They too have planned a state prison to close in a few years that occupies an important piece of land. In addition to the Indiana Dunes National Park and about a mile by Lake Michigan, the redevelopment could unlock a new future for the city, which has experienced for years falling population numbers but recently started to grow.
But first the city will have to get control of the real estate from the state – something that can be difficult. And then there is the issue of the history of the prison. “They do executions on location; They have had a long time, “said Doug Farr, an architect who helps Michigan City with his plan. “Somewhere in this complex there is a chair or something.”
Finding out how you can honor a site where the executions took place will be difficult, Mr Farr said. But it will take years for the development to be completed, and “we count on a delay,” he said. “Maybe people will lack their memories by that time.”
