Jail for Sale:
In a real estate crazed city like Vancouver where a heritage house can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars over its list price, turns out it’s just not that easy to sell an old jail.
Realtor Leonardo di Francesco has had parts of the former BC Penitentiary on the market since last December, so this week I drove out to New Westminster to check out the buildings and former prison grounds.
BC Pen was a maximum-security federal jail that opened in 1878 and closed in 1980. Most of the buildings were demolished and the grounds turned into townhouses in an area that’s been remarketed from Jailhouse Blues to Fraser Lands. The two heritage-designated buildings that survived though are quite impressive.
Gate House:
The one-time jail gatehouse is exactly 60 steps up from Columbia Street. It looks like a giant castle, and was a daycare, offices for a technology company, and most recently a pub/restaurant. Built in 1931, it’s currently empty and assessed at $3.4 million.
The second building is the three-storey prison and hospital completed in 1878. Current tenants include a sports medicine clinic and an orthopedic surgery. It was constructed out of heavy stone which di Francesco tells me was brought over from England because the weight of the stone was useful in balancing the ship’s cargo. It’s currently assessed at $4.5 million.
The third building for sale, currently a church and daycare, was built in 1989—nine years after BC Pen was decommissioned. While it’s not a heritage building, it does have a beautiful garden and the prison’s brass bell that was cast in 1895. According to the plaque the bell “was used to call in the inmates from the fields, toll the meal hours and signal that the inmate count was correct.” It also rang when prisoners escaped or held a riot. That property (which includes the bell) is currently assessed at $1.7 million.
© Eve Lazarus, 2022