Wall Street Journal praised Eastern State Penitentiary as a wedding venue. Gross.

This week, the Wall Street Journal wrote about an uncommon wedding venue in Philadelphia: the Eastern State Penitentiary. The story about “venues that give a new twist to the ol’ ball and chain” was almost expertly designed to give readers the ick. Prison puns aside, why are people seeking to celebrate in spaces where others were tortured and abused?

I moved to Philly last year and while I’ve visited Eastern State, I had no idea that the prison has offered weddings for more than a decade now. Walking into old cells and hearing about the crushing reality of incarceration did not evoke thoughts of party planning or expressions of love.

Why weddings in a former prison, you ask? One Philly Mag wedding writer praised the idea when Eastern State first announced the offering in 2013: “It makes sense: Prison/marriage metaphors aside, the space itself is nothing short of magnificent, and it really is a Philadelphia landmark with super cool history and amazing architecture.”

In 2010, The Inquirer wrote about the popularity of engagement photoshoots at the historic prison. “Eastern State is really photogenic. There are 1,200 skylights, and the walls have lots of texture and color. It’s the type of thing a Hollywood set builder would try to re-create,” said an Eastern State staffer at the time.

What about couples snapping family photos in the very cells that pioneered solitary confinement is “super cool?”

So pretty! So much history! The photos will look great! People said the same about plantation weddings, which have been under scrutiny in recent years with wedding planning sites like Pinterest and the Knot promising to stop glorifying them. Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively even apologized for their wedding at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, eight years after the ceremony.

These structures are living reminders of the atrocities that enslaved Black Americans experienced for centuries, not nostalgic sites of “charming” history. As Malaika Jabali wrote in an apt critique in 2019, “Historical texts, news articles and academic research are all available for anyone genuinely interested in examining slavery’s brutality.” Plantation weddings, as she says, are wrong. “Why is it so hard for white Americans to admit that?” she asks. The same goes for prisons, which represent modern-day slavery in the form of mass incarceration.

But still, historic prisons are seemingly fair game as wedding venues, considered “unique,” “quirky,” and “catchy,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The practice is especially disgusting — and sickly ironic — in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the nation that incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.

The history in question obviously hits differently depending on your background. Where some couples see old-school beauty, others see bloodshed and violence perpetrated against their communities. Some day, I hope to know the demographics of the couples and wedding guests partying in prisons across the U.S. How many are people of color? How many of these people have family members who are incarcerated? Prisons should not be commodified into lifestyle content.

Eastern State explicitly says that the proceeds from its (also cringe-worthy) haunted Halloween event go toward efforts to educate the public about the impacts of mass incarceration on Black and brown communities. How much of that knowledge is valued or understood by the people gallivanting around at a prison yard wedding? Evidently precious little.