‘LIBERTY’
Liberty at Laurel Hill is a development 20 miles outside Washington, DC, in Lorton, Virginia. A public/private partnership, this $190 million dollar project spans 80 acres of the former Lorton Correctional Complex (also known as the Lorton Reformatory) Washington, DC’s prison established in 1910 and closed in 2001. The development repurposes the low-lying brick buildings that comprised the prison, turning dormitories into condos, mess halls into lounges, and the baseball diamond into a shopping mall parking lot.
In the 80’s and 90’s, the Lorton prison was notorious for being overcrowded and violent. In a period of rising mass-incarceration, the War on Drugs funneled Black DC residents into the prison system. In 1991, fifteen percent of Washington’s Black men ages 18-35 were in prison, while a total of forty-two percent were “enmeshed in the criminal justice system” in some way. The prison was filled far past its intended capacity and the DC government deigned to respond to inmate complaints about conditions and treatment. One of the ways inmates responded to the grievous circumstances of their imprisonment was through uprisings, including setting fire to the prison buildings.
In order to entice condo-owners and businesses to the complex, Alexander Company, the developer responsible for the carceral architecture’s revitalization, rebranded the site, “liberating the prison from the dark past… [while] at the same time respecting the history.” In order to receive historic preservation tax credits, in addition to original buildings, many of the original features, such as the brick masonry walls and bars on windows, had to be retained in the redesign. On its website, Alexander Company sells the view of a guard tower from bedroom windows as the “beautifully natural and historic character” of the development.
While the interior brick walls have been whitewashed, and the windows scrubbed, the site still feels haunted. Karim Mowatt, filmmaker and former inmate at Lorton said: “I wouldn't live there because it still feels like a prison…It definitely resurrected memories because everything is still in place. So it’s not like they just kept this one wall or this one walkway. It's literally the whole prison is still a prison but they changed the dormitories into apartments.” The history put forth by the development company and on-site museum glosses quickly over the prison’s past, offering a historical façade that does little work to conceal the gaps and distortions it proffers.
SEDIMENT
To understand the history of the Lorton prison, I use what I call architectural sedimentology: the study of how a structure came to be formed, and by what processes. In the case of Lorton, this inquiry is grounded in the materiality of the brick buildings. The bricks connect the deep time of raw sedimentary material from the Occoquan River, which borders the site and was a convenient source of clay, to the refashioned condominiums of the present, and, most importantly, what occurred in between.
Sediments are fine particles that settle to the bottom of water, or blow in the wind. Think muck, or dust. Clay, however, is by far the most abundant sedimentary material.
Sediments are carriers of memory. Geologists examine clay minerals to gain insight into historical environments on both human and deep time scales. Ceramic [fired clay] materials, in the form of tablets, pottery shards, or brick, are also used to inform archeological and anthropological studies.
Sedimentary rocks form in layers, or strata, one on top of the other. A core sample gives insight into the buried strata, a record of a space in time– revealing the layers of history that shaped a place. For both geologic and human processes, clay and its products are sedimentary media: they record and witness the accretion of time.
Anthropogenic landscapes can also be understood as the product of sedimentation, deposited in layers of strata. Scholars of race in the United States have employed this geologic metaphor to describe the historical influence of racisms, particularly in the built landscape, over time. “Since landscapes are artifacts of past and present racisms, they embody generations of sociospatial relations, what might be called the ‘sedimentation of racial inequality,’” write sociologists Oliver and Shapiro. Scholar of race and suburbia, Wendy Cheng, utilizes this attention to sedimentation and strata to highlight that “in any landscape only the uppermost layer may be visible, but nonetheless the cumulative processes that formed all the layers below still shape the uppermost layer and may cause shifts and ruptures at any time.”
The sedimentology approach stands as a corrective to the surface-level re-branding of the former prison. A core sample of the site reveals that the buildings have witnessed more than the developer would like the façade to show.
At Lorton, incarcerated people were forced to fashion the walls of their own captivity and the towers of their surveillance. They dug, formed, and fired bricks in giant beehive kilns on the site of the prison, next to the Occoquan river. They provided the labor to build the prison out of these bricks. They turned sediment to stone.
In the 19th century, before the prison was established, the land was a plantation, where tobacco monoculture made possible by the labor of enslaved people likely filled the river with silt runoff. Liberty at Laurel Hill, the full name of the re-development, is named after the plantation that once stood on the site. It underwent its own adaptive re-use during the transition from plantation to prison, when the overseer’s house was turned into the prison warden’s residence. The place is thick with the changing regimes of anti-Black violence.
The prison closed due to budget cuts and under the guise of overcrowding and worsening conditions for inmates, but in the 90’s the rising economic value of the land as real estate for development was undeniable. The closing “lessened the city’s financial burden at the cost of shipping inmates across the US far from loved ones, increasing communication fees for family members, and benefiting real estate speculators in Fairfax [VA]” spoke Nicole Porter.
The closing of Lorton prison does not represent a moment of decarceration, but rather the extraction of land value through the forced dispersal of incarcerated people across the US in the federal prison system.
The brick façade of the former prison plays a paradoxical role: as advertised, it lends a generic historicity to the site, but when materially examined, it is a sedimentary record of the weight of the layers of history the site bears.
It would be impossible for me to do justice to the histories of Lorton here. People lived and died there, or were in and out. People took photography classes. Did political organizing. Participated in musical performances. Worked. Cleaned. Set fires and filed lawsuits in protest of mistreatment and abuse. Struggled daily against the brutality of the prison-as-warehouse. Sediment is a conceptual framework for understanding that these stories matter; that they shape the present.
SPACE-TIME VISUALIZATION
The liberal progress narrative of Liberty looks to the future without accounting for the sedimented past. Inspired by the Black Quantum Futurism collective and Viviane Saleh-Hanna’s critiques of the linearity of white Western conceptions of time, I have attempted to graphically model an alternate timescape of the Lorton site, one richly sedimented rather than straight and narrow.
One of the consequences of the linear temporal epistemology is the ability to assert that the past is “gone” and over. This chronotope makes it easy to avoid contending with historical justice claims like those pertaining to colonization, enslavement, or incarceration.
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Lipton, Eric. “Lorton Proposal Would Transfer Land to Fairfax.” The Washington Post, October 14, 1997.
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