In the former industrial district off King Street West at Liberty, there’s a strange old building sitting next to land recently cleared for condos

It’s what remains of Central Prison, a 600-cell institution that made the Kingston Pen look like a finishing school. It opened in 1873, back when the area was still well out of earshot of the general public. According to historians (and rumour), prisoners were served rancid meat, routinely and brutally flogged, and even beaten to death by guards, their bodies secretly buried on the facility’s rambling grounds. Thankfully, the prison was abandoned in 1915, as changing attitudes toward crime and punishment led to a revamping of the province’s correctional system. The facility was quickly demolished, save for a corner of the south wing that had once housed the chapel. That corner became part of the city’s inventory of heritage properties in 1985—a last reminder of an unholy era.