Lancaster Should Save the Castle, Not the Prison

adamzurn

2 hours ago

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Lancaster has an opportunity to do what it has done well before: take a difficult, complicated, or outdated piece of its built environment and turn it into something useful, memorable, and worthy of the city’s future.

As Lancaster County prepares to move forward with a new prison outside the city, attention has turned to what should happen to the current Lancaster County Prison site on East King Street. The recently discussed Lancaster East End Small Area Plan imagines a future with new housing, community space, retail, and a better connection to surrounding neighborhoods. Those are worthy goals. The East End deserves investment. It deserves housing. It deserves public space. It deserves a future that is not defined by incarceration.

But that future does not require erasing the most architecturally distinctive part of the site. The castle-like facade of the old prison should be saved and incorporated into whatever comes next.

To be clear, preserving the facade does not mean preserving the prison’s purpose. It does not mean romanticizing incarceration. It does not mean ignoring the pain many people associate with that building. The prison has been a source of trauma for individuals, families, and communities. For some residents, especially those who have lived near it or passed it every day, the building is not an architectural curiosity. It is a reminder of confinement, punishment, and harm.

That concern deserves to be taken seriously.

But demolition is not the only way to address painful history. Sometimes, the more powerful act is transformation.

Lancaster has already proven that historic facades can strengthen major redevelopment projects. The Lancaster Marriott at Penn Square turned the preserved Watt & Shand facade into one of downtown’s most recognizable assets. That project did not freeze the old department store in time. It allowed new development to rise behind and around a historic architectural face, creating a landmark that still feels rooted in Lancaster.

The Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center offers another example. That project shows how complicated history can be transformed into a meaningful public space. It does not avoid difficult subjects. It engages them. It uses place, architecture, and interpretation to tell a fuller story.

The prison’s castle facade could do the same.

How many cities can say they have a castle? Lancaster can. Or at least it can for now. The question is whether we see that as an obstacle or an opportunity.

Imagine the East King Street facade no longer as the entrance to a jail, but as the entrance to a community hall, arts space, public market, museum, event venue, or neighborhood center. Imagine the towers preserved, the razor wire gone, the walls softened by landscaping, the entryway opened with light instead of bars. Imagine new housing rising behind it, with the old stonework serving not as a barrier, but as a civic front door.

*This rendering shows what the new housing and community space at the current location of Lancaster County Prison would look like if the building’s facade were saved and incorporated into the design.*

That kind of reuse would give the redevelopment something most new construction struggles to create: instant identity.

Without the facade, the site may become useful. With it, the site could become unforgettable, while avoiding the same fate that befell so many of Lancaster’s iconic structures during the misguided urban renewal efforts of the 1960s.

There are practical concerns, of course. Preservation can complicate redevelopment. The facade’s location may interfere with proposed street layouts. Developers may prefer a blank slate. But cities should be careful when “easier” becomes the deciding factor in whether an irreplaceable landmark survives.

Once the towers are gone, they are gone.

Lancaster has lost enough distinctive buildings to know that regret often arrives too late. The point is not to save every wall or every cell block. The point is to identify what is most meaningful, most visible, and most capable of being reborn. In this case, that is the castle facade.

Keeping it would not prevent change. It would make the change stronger.

The East End deserves redevelopment that brings new life to the neighborhood. It deserves housing, walkable streets, small businesses, green space, and community uses. But it also deserves a design that remembers where it is. A generic redevelopment could happen anywhere. A project that incorporates Lancaster’s castle could only happen here.

That is the value of preservation at its best. It is not about nostalgia. It is about continuity, creativity, and civic imagination.

Saving the prison facade does not mean saving the prison. It means reclaiming one of Lancaster’s most unusual architectural landmarks and giving it a new civic life. Residents can read and weigh in on the study until May 15 at https://engage.cityoflancasterpa.gov/en/projects/east-end-area-plan.