Missouri History Museum
Emil Boehl, Four Courts, 12th and Clark
Recent events at the City Justice Center in downtown St. Louis raise the question: How did we get here? Over the millennia in Western civilization, the act of detaining suspects has evolved as the time in which they're confined before a trial has lengthened. The founding of the United States on Enlightenment principles further developed the concept of “humane confinement.” The city of St. Louis likewise has seen a succession of jails over the course of the past two centuries that mirror the evolution of criminal justice in America and the action and reaction against perceived past abuses.
One of the first major reforms in St. Louis justice was the banning of public humiliation, such as displaying of criminals in stocks, which came with the annexation of the Louisiana Territory into the United States. But the first serious jail of which we have a photograph soon followed. It was a rudimentary structure, built of stone on the southeast corner of Sixth and Chestnut, conveniently located less than a block from the Old Courthouse. It was far from ideal.
Missouri History Museum
Boehl and Koenig, Old City Jail, 6th and Chestnut, 1870
The Niles National Register reported nine prisoners escaped from the jail on July 29, 1840. Executions by hanging were occurring there by 1844, as another newspaper article announced that two murderers, John McDaniel and Josh Brown, were sentenced to death for murder. Problems with locks at the jail were so infamous that they reached New Orleans; the Times-Picayune reported that a burglar picked the lock on his cell and walked out the front door quietly. Unfortunately, the absconder ran into a jailer walking to work down the street, who recognized him and escorted him back to the jail, where he was locked in an “iron safe.”
St. Louis was rapidly expanding in size and population, and the city was feeling the growing pains. The Alton Telegraph reported:
“...during the month of August [1848], there were confined in the St. Louis jail, for various offenses, 25 persons, and in the calaboose, 209, and that this number increased in September, to 59 in the county jail, and 323 in the calaboose. From the reports given in the papers, it would seem as if all the villains in the United States were now congregated in St. Louis—almost every description of rascality being daily perpetrated in that city.”
Even with the opening of the Workhouse, it became obvious after the squalid and overcrowded conditions during the Civil War that it was time for a larger jail to accommodate a city that would reach 300,000 people in the 1870 census. The new Municipal Courthouse, designed by Thomas Waryng Walsh, became known as the Four Courts after the famous landmark in Dublin. Walsh was the father of future brewery architect, Robert, and had designed various other famous landmarks across St. Louis, including the preliminary plans for St. Francis Xavier on the campus of St. Louis University. There were no architecture firms that “specialized” in jails at the time.
Missouri History Museum
Andrew J. O'Reilly, view of the back of the Four Courts, showing jail and morgue, August 9, 1888
Reacting against the dark, squalid, and cramped conditions of the past, Walsh’s new design was meant to be open, airy, and light-filled. As was also the trend in Thomas Story Kirkbride–inspired buildings in the mental health field at the same time, the belief was that those natural elements had a curative effect on “disobedient” and “maladaptive” members of society. The front of Four Courts was a dramatic Second Empire opera stage of a building, which opened into the half rotunda of the jail’s cell blocks behind. A rectangular wall surrounded the curved structure, providing an exercise yard for the prisoners awaiting trial in the courthouse conveniently attached to the jail. The gallows were also located in the yard, and the sheriff would preside over the hangings. Invitees would receive a letter with a black border in the mail if they could witness the execution in the yard of the Four Courts jail.
Chapter 21, Article III of the City Charter of 1901 laid down the requirements for the office of jailer and his staff for the Four Courts jail. The head jailer must be an American citizen. He was appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council and was paid $1,500 a year. The head jailer would appoint a deputy, paid $1,000; a clerk, paid $600; a chief cook, paid $600; an assistant cook, paid $480; and two second assistant cooks, paid $360 each. There were 24 guards, three of which should be women, each paid $720. All staff were paid monthly, and it seems that the women were paid the same as the men. Children under the age of 15 were not kept in the jail.
Missouri History Museum
W.C. Persons, view of Civic Center, 1929-30
Thirty years later, the Four Courts was obsolete, thanks to the city of St. Louis yet again expanding rapidly. Its Mansard roofs were leaking and out of date according to the new architectural trends of the 20th century. By 1907, Isaac Taylor was commissioned to build a new Municipal Courts, which opened in 1910 included a matching modern jail out back. Again, the housing of prisoners followed the latest trends in American thinking, caught up in the City Beautiful Movement. The central core of St. Louis was undergoing urban renewal at the beginning of the 20th century, and the aging private houses and businesses built around the Civil War were being torn down to make way for a new Civic Forum. The jail with its courthouse fronting this public space was part of the new image the city wished to project.
The Engineers’ Club of St. Louis wrote a glowing review in 1920 of the new jail behind Isaac Taylor’s Municipal Courts. Built between 1913-14 at a cost of $300,000, it was sheathed in Bedford limestone to make it as aesthetically pleasing. In the eyes of the article, it looked like a hospital or an office building, not a jail. Its main entrance was on 14th and the building was six stories. When originally built, the fifth and sixth floors were not completed. The services such as the kitchen were in the basement, and administrative offices were on the first floor. The cells then were on the second through fourth floors. The walls of the cells were made of steel plates covered with poured concrete—Taylor had argued that it would be more sanitary than bare steel. There was one shower room for every twelve cells. The women were kept in the incomplete fifth floor, with women segregated by race in the east wing. White men were kept on the second and third floors, allowing for two men to a cell, as designed, and Black men were crowded three to a cell on the fourth floor. This jail would be in operation the longest—and probably will hold the record—all the way until 2002, when the new jail opened across from City Hall on Tucker Boulevard.
Perhaps that has been the trend all along, these past 200 years in St. Louis and America at large. Seeking to break away from the Medieval justice they left behind in Europe, America’s judicial reformers have wanted so badly to reform the one place no one wants to think about, a place where people are kept locked up against their will. They've tried time and time again to cloak those structures in beautiful architecture, hiding the actual purpose of the building. Oh, it looks like a French hôtel, or a hospital, or an office building. Look at the big windows! But at the end of the day, a jail is a jail.
