The Warden's House sits at the corner of Penitentiary Boulevard and West Street, immediately outside the walls of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary — known to generations of inmates as "Big Mac." Inmates built the two-storey stone house in 1909 from limestone quarried on the prison grounds; successive wardens lived there until the late twentieth century.
You cannot go inside, but the house is plainly visible from the road and gives a sense of how completely the prison shaped the north end of McAlester. The penitentiary itself has been at the centre of city life since 1908 and remains the state's main maximum-security facility.