The Associated Press

At the newly opened Liberty Hotel, it's hard to escape what this building once was: a decrepit jail where Boston locked up its most notorious prisoners.

After a five-year, $150 million US renovation, the old Charles Street jail is now a luxury hotel for guests who can afford to pay anywhere from $319 US a night for the lowest-priced room to $5,500 US for the presidential suite. The hotel, at the foot of Boston's stately Beacon Hill neighbourhood, opened in September.

Architects took pains to preserve many features of the 156-year-old stone building and its history. The old sally port, where guards once brought prisoners from paddy wagons to their cells, is being converted into the entrance to a new restaurant, Scampo, which is Italian for "escape."

Instead of con men, counterfeiters and cat burglars, the guests now include Mick Jagger, Annette Bening, Meg Ryan and Eva Mendes. The old clientele included Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, who served time for fraud in 1904 after he took a civil service exam for a friend; Frank Abagnale Jr., a 1960s con artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Catch Me If You Can; a group of thieves who pulled off the Great Brinks Robbery in Boston in 1950; and a German U-boat captain who was captured in 1945 and killed himself with shards from his sunglasses.

When the jail opened in 1851, it was hailed as an international model for prison architecture. Built in the shape of a cross, the granite jail had a 27-metre-high central rotunda and four wings of cells. Large arched windows provided lots of natural light and good ventilation. Each of the 220 cells housed just one inmate. But over the years, the jail fell into disrepair and became filthy, overcrowded and prone to riots.

In the 1970s, the inmates sued over the squalid conditions. After spending a night at the jail to see things for himself, a federal judge in 1973 ordered the place closed. But it took until 1990 for a new jail to be built and the last inmates to be moved.

The property was bought by Massachusetts General Hospital, next door, which invited proposals for preserving the building's historical character. Cambridge developer Richard Friedman said the architects tried to retain some original elements while not reminding people too much of its dark past.

"How do you transform that into a joyous place where people have fun and a good time?" Friedman said. "We tried to use a sense of humour."

Eighteen of the hotel's 298 rooms are built in the original jail. Those rooms feature the original brick walls of the jail but also have high-definition TVs. The remaining rooms are in a new 16-storey tower.

Max Stern, the chief lawyer for the inmates whose lawsuit led to the jail's closing, said some aspects of the project — such as calling one of the hotel's restaurant the Clink — are too lighthearted.

"I thought they could have been a little more objective about what it really was like," he said.