A quick trip to the prison

I have decided that I won’t talk about the Stage (the language intensive program) on here because it’s not fun and it is unnecessarily frustrating. I would prefer for this platform not to solely be for me complaining. That’s done better in person with animated gesticulations, excessive eye-rolls, and sarcastic intonation.

Instead, I want to talk about visiting la Prison Saint-Paul. The Saint Paul prison is a historic radial plan prison, like Eastern State Penitentiary, that first opened in 1865. The prison closed in 2009 and a new prison was constructed outside of the city. Note: research in the United States is limited. I found way more information in France. Why? I don’t know. Maybe some of these websites only work on French servers. Why? I don’t know. If you want to know my sources, leave a comment and I’ll make an edit.

So while I was French Googling the prison, I found out something that made me sound like the beginning of “Thriftshop.” The Catholic University in Lyon has acquired the site from the local government to…

…create a new campus.

I’m sorry, what?

After reading this, I booked it over to the prison. I got a little lost on the way but a very nice French family helped me navigate the Perrache train station. You literally have to go through the entire station (which has stops for the tram, the metro, the train, and the super-fast train). It was a big train station. From the stairs in the way down, this is what I saw:

I know, right? I walked around the entire perimeter and took as many pictures as I could.

I was incredibly surprised by the amount of demolition. I would think that in preserving the building they would, you know, preserve the building. From what I've seen, it looks like they are keeping the parts of the building that were important for their architecture. All of this is very reminiscent of when people in Philly wanted to revamp ESP after it closed (not that I was actually there. I just scanned the documents). The only difference is that the University and the city are acting on this.

Which makes sense for them if you consider the concept of patrimoine. Why would the government want to keep a building full of dark history? It serves no positive purpose, save for the architectural innovation of the radial plan. I wonder if I would still be having this self-righteous attitude if I hadn't worked in a prison historic site. I wonder if I would have known it existed.

I have more work to do. The archives are right by there and I could find some more stuff online.

What I really need to do is find someone at the University I can talk to. Mackenzie in a Catholic school. That will be interesting.