The old county jail — Keith Academy
A front built to read as a fortress — but a generation older than the stone house on Fairmount Street and in a different idiom: the Romanesque Revival of the 1850s rather than the Chateauesque of the 1880s.
The castle-like granite building beside the South Common, across from the 1850 courthouse and next door to the Greater Lowell YMCA, is the former Middlesex County jail. Completed in 1856 to designs by Lowell architect James H. Rand, its rough-faced granite center block, with twin octagonal towers and an arcaded gable, is flanked by brick Italianate wings. The jail closed in 1919; in 1926 the Catholic Church bought it and converted it into Keith Academy, a high school that ran until 1970. Vacant through the 1970s, when the YMCA owned it, the building was converted into condominiums in the mid-1980s and is still called the Keith Academy. It is part of the South Common Historic District (National Register, 1982; MACRIS LOW.380).
Still to check
- A record of the 1980s condominium conversion beyond the assessor’s card.
- Photographs from the public street.
Sources
- National Register of Historic Places nomination, South Common Historic District, reference no. 82001993 (1982)
- Massachusetts Historical Commission, MACRIS inventory LOW.380, “Lowell Jail – Keith Academy” (inventoried at 159 Thorndike Street, the earlier street number)
- City of Lowell assessor’s record, 191 Thorndike Street
Research note: C-070.