TOURING THE BIG HOUSE: KINGSTON PEN
Kingston Penitentiary was the largest public building in Upper Canada when it opened
The joint. The slammer. The clink.
The institutions where miscreants and malfeasants do time for their misdeeds go by many names.
But there is only one KP ... Kingston Penitentiary ... which, as lock-ups go in Canada, was the big house in every way.
When it opened for business in 1835, it was the largest public building in Upper Canada and occupied 80 hectares of waterfront land that included stone quarries, a prison farm and a four-hectare complex of buildings to accommodate up to 1,000 prisoners.
But more formidable than its physical presence is the roster of offenders who served their sentences behind KP’s massive limestone walls.
They were the worst of the worst — Black Donnelly patriarch James, serial child killer Clifford Olsen, murderous rapist Paul Bernardo, homicidal air force colonel Russell Williams, wife slayer Helmuth Buxbaum and prolific pedophile James Cooper — once described by a Hamilton judge as “a lowdown, mean, despicable, evil manifestation of a human being.”
Mobsters, bank robbers, cop killers, fraudsters — thousands upon thousands who failed to follow society’s rules languished behind KP’s iron bars over its 178 years of operation.
On Sept. 30, 2013, the massive wooden doors groaned open to release the last prisoner, a man who believed he was the king of England and the guards were his servants.
“All the big ones you can think of, they walked here,” says Mike, a corrections officer who worked at KP in the 1980s and is now a guide on the phenomenally popular Kingston Penitentiary tours.
He’s posted in “the dome,” the circular hub of the main cellblock, from which four floors of cell ranges radiate like spokes.
“This is the belly of the beast,” says Mike, one of 15 to 30 former guards on staff during the tour season, none of whom want their photos taken or full names used, for obvious reasons.
It was there that inmates took complete control of the prison for four days in 1971, a rampage that saw six guards taken hostage, 14 “undesirables” beaten with metal bars by other inmates (two of them to death), and virtually all the cellblocks and ranges destroyed.
Among the first targets of the prisoners’ rage was a circular brass bell mounted in the dome. It would ring more than 30 times a day, a jangling order to do this, go here, eat now, a constant reminder to the inmates that their lives were not their own. “They hated that bell,” says Mike. During the riot, they managed to smash the bell to near smithereens. Its remains can be seen across the street in the fascinating Correctional Service of Canada museum, the once grand home built by prisoners for a succession of wardens.
Tours of the penitentiary began almost as soon as the institution closed, with the release of tickets over a two-week period in November 2013 as a fundraiser for the United Way and Habitat for Humanity. The tickets sold out within hours and, last year, when an expanded tour program resumed, the demand was overwhelming.
“We sold about 60,000 tickets in 2016,” says Susan Le Clair, spokesperson for the St. Lawrence Parks Commission, which runs the tours in conjunction with the City of Kingston and CSC.
“We released them in segments, but as soon as another block was released, they were snapped up. The demand and the response were unbelievable.”
Despite the inherent horrors of a place that housed so many evil people, and a history of unspeakable abuses and violations of the most basic human rights, the attraction is understandable.
The Pen has been an imposing fixture on Kingston’s waterfront since its inception, a huge, menacing, walled structure on a main thoroughfare of the city.
“People are fascinated by what they can’t see, where they can’t go,” says Le Clair, who notes the architecture and history of the place hold enormous appeal.
Indeed, the interest is so intense that this year the parks commission added a 2-1/2 hour “premium” tour to the standard 90-minute option.
Entering through the front gate into the reception area is a sobering experience. It’s impossible not to think about the individuals who entered this place involuntarily, people who passed through those doors into a hell on earth, no matter their crime.
And if the conditions faced by prisoners in more enlightened times were considered unacceptable, imagine what fate awaited the men ... and women and children ... of the 19th century.
The curious tourist has no way of knowing whether the rust and decay and peeling paint are a product of disuse over the past four years or a reality of the decades that preceded them.
Depending on the tour taken, participants can see the visitors and correspondence units (where prisoners talked to visitors by telephone through glass, just like on TV), the heavily secured north gate (through which prisoners and supplies arrived), the infamous dome, tiny cells furnished with girlie magazines and slippers and other belongings of former prisoners, the segregation and protective custody cells, the hospital, barber shop, recreation yard, laundry room, gymnasium, high school classrooms and interview rooms where lawyers conferred with clients.
A lesser-known function of the Pen was its workshops, where contract work was done for outside companies through CORCAN, (a corporation that could only do business with government entities and nonprofit companies) and inmates could learn a trade. There, prisoners made furniture for government offices, lockers for high schools, mailbags for Canada Post and, ironically, locks for the Canada Lock Company.
The upholstery shop was used in the recent filming of a CBC miniseries debuting Sept. 25 based on Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace,” which tells the story of Irish immigrant Grace Marks, convicted in 1843 of murdering her employer and committed to Kingston Penitentiary.
The KP tours have not been without their detractors, who wonder whether turning the place into a tourist attraction is glorification, sensationalism, insensitivity or all of the above.
“We have tried to ensure that we’re being very respectful and sensitive, not sensational,” says Le Clair.
Last year alone, the tours contributed more than $322,000 to the United Way’s coffers. And their significance to tourism in the Kingston area is immeasurable.
The future of KP, designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1990, is still undecided. There’s talk of mixed commercial and residential use blended with the heritage buildings on the prime waterfront site, whittled over the years to 8.6 hectares.
All of which means that the time to see KP ... to see its bleak, decaying interior; the bars and turnstiles and barbed wire; the angry, obscene graffiti carved into the walls and furnishings; the family visitation units where prisoners could spend up to 72 hours with a loved one or family but had to surface for inspection five times a day; the barred windows of the shops that overlooked the tantalizing freedom of Lake Ontario ... is now.