eastern state penitentiary

In the big house...just visiting

By Maura J. Casey

May 11, 2007 - New York Times

A few blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a massive, crumbling building rises up like a medieval castle over blocks of modest, middle-class homes mixed with brownstones. Complete with ivy-covered walls, a tower and corner battlements, it casts a forbidding shadow over the city — as it was meant to. Built in 1829, this hulking pile of stone was Pennsylvania's Eastern State Penitentiary, a cautionary landmark for nearly a century and a half, the place nobody wanted to go.

Now, people are paying to get in.

Almost 150,000 tourists passed through the forbidding gates of Eastern State last year — into a dark hallway, through a gift shop that has a subterranean feel and down dusty corridors lined by crumbling walls. With audio tour guides at their ears, they go through cellblocks; gaze at the mess halls, hospital and prison chapel; climb into a guard tower; and pace in the exercise yard. They peer into the cells of death row.

Teenagers giggle tentatively; children are subdued; adults exhibit a kind of nervous relief, never happier to be law-abiding citizens. But the paying customers keep coming. And Eastern State is just one of three dozen prisons and jails now collectively drawing millions of visitors each year around the country.

From Maui to Louisiana, crowds tread dark passages where heavy doors still slam shut with ringing finality — though most of these eerily evocative tourist attractions no longer actually house convicts. Prisons proudly display cells once inhabited by famous criminals. Some show off gallows or an electric chair.

 

There is even a proposal to open a museum at Sing Sing in Ossining, N.Y., though, so far, plans have been stymied by the cost and by doubts in some quarters about the wisdom of opening the grounds of a working maximum security prison.

In a handful of prisons, guests are actually paying to stay over — though in much-improved quarters. In Boston, the 1851 Charles Street Prison on Beacon Hill has been remodeled into a hotel, the Liberty, scheduled to open this summer with vestiges of jail cells in the lobby and bars on several of the windows. Abroad, buildings that have served as prisons and are now hotels can be found in Amsterdam, Istanbul and Oxford, England.

Whether called correctional institutions or the clink, prisons hold an enduring fascination. They've been the subject of songs, films and TV series. They inspire pity and even empathy; haven't most of us felt imprisoned at one time or another, or longed for liberation? Still, in the beginning, the public's interest in sampling the atmosphere of the Big House took just about everyone by surprise.

In 1971 the National Park Service opened the decaying remains of Alcatraz, the notorious maximum-security prison on an island in San Francisco Bay, to visitors under a five-year plan, on the assumption that interest would peter out. It soon became one of the biggest tourist attractions in Northern California and has remained open ever since, with boats from San Francisco carrying passengers over for tours.

The park service has just completed a major renovation, expanding Alcatraz's exhibits and facilities to keep up with more than a million visitors a year.

Soon states and cities with their own decaying former prisons — usually fortresslike piles of stone with no obvious use — began to wonder if they could turn these burdens into moneymakers. At the same time, preservationists became advocates for saving prisons from the wrecking ball. Thus, the trend was born; prisons are now open to the curious — for the price of a ticket.

ON a cloudy Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia, several people dodged raindrops and walked through the gate at Eastern State. Most were tourists, but two lived nearby, entitled to the free membership that Eastern State offers neighbors. Their self-guided audio tour, following the pattern set at Alcatraz, included narratives from former prisoners and guards.

When it opened, the visitors were told, Eastern State was seen as a model of modernity and enlightenment. It had running water, central heat and flush toilets in individual cells — more than 20 years before the White House had modern plumbing.
Eastern State also followed an 1820s reformist theory about correction, which posited that solitude was the path to rehabilitation. All prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for their entire sentences to reflect on their crimes. To maintain the quiet, guards even put socks over their shoes to muffle their footsteps.

Although some social commentators, including Charles Dickens, thought the lack of human contact would drive most prisoners insane, Eastern State was hugely influential, and 300 prisons on five continents were built based on its model, according to museum officials.

In one of the blocks, the original cells are on display, each with a heavy oak door and a small, round window in the ceiling called “the eye of God,” through which light streams in. Each cell has its own tiny exercise yard. Ceilings curve upward like the arches of a church.

Eventually, attitudes about punishment caught up with the plumbing. After 1900, Eastern State was mostly a typical prison on the 20th-century model. It closed in 1971, and tours began in the mid-1980s.

Much has been forgiven. There, as at Alcatraz, both ex-prisoners and former guards speak on the recordings that visitors hear as they walk through the prison. The two groups even mingle at reunions.

The experiences of two former inmates suggest that even in the middle of the 20th century, life behind the walls of Eastern State was a mixture of the macabre and mundane.

Willie L. Smith, now a sprightly 80-year-old, was incarcerated at Eastern State beginning in 1947, for “20 years, 8 months and 29 days,” as he precisely recalls, for a murder he says he did not commit.

“There was always killing in there,” Mr. Smith said. “Everybody had a knife. If you wanted to do a shank you could,” he said of the inmates' practice of making weapons.

Yet both he and Robert Moore, who served a little more than 11 years beginning in 1958 for armed robbery, remembered small triumphs. Mr. Smith recalled pitching two no-hitters on a prison team. Mr. Moore said he learned to play chess and didn't lose a game during a four-year period before he was released. He also remembered, with satisfaction, getting up in the middle of one winter night to help work on the prison central heating system when it malfunctioned. When he was done with the repairs, “it was so hot you could heat a cup of coffee” on the prison radiators, Mr. Moore said.

Mr. Smith explained with a laugh that he helped build several dozen high-security cells, only to find himself later assigned to one for 90 days for breaking the rules.

FROM state to state, each prison tour vies for its share of attention. In Maui, there's Hale Paahao, the “stuck in irons house, ” with its shackles and walls made of a mix of coral and stone. At the Old Jail Museum in Jim Thorpe, Pa., visitors can view a replica of a gallows on which four people were hanged at once. At the Authentic Old Jail Museum in St. Augustine, Fla., a doorway opens to a grim cell with no windows or mattress.

At the Crime and Punishment Museum in Ashburn, Ga., visitors can eat lunch at the Last Meal Cafe, which has, the museum's Web site proclaims, “meals to die for.”

 

Escapes and escape attempts are a common theme. Alcatraz had more than its share: 34 men tried to flee during 14 escape attempts, visitors are told, including two who tried to escape twice. Six were shot, 23 were recaptured, at least 2 drowned.

Three men who broke free in 1962 were never seen again, and their elaborate jail break inspired the movie, “Escape from Alcatraz,” starring Clint Eastwood. The prisoners left lifelike dummies in their beds, complete with human hair, the better to fool the guards. The cell they fled, with replicas of the dummies, is on the Alcatraz tour. Since there's no record of anyone surviving the chilly waters and deadly rip currents around the Rock, as inmates called Alcatraz, it is believed that the men drowned.

At Eastern State, a display about an almost comical 1945 escape attempt by 11 men, complete with a 90-foot-long tunnel, is backed up with an archaeological dig.

Eastern State also has some other unusual details. A bronze plaque on one wall memorializes inmates who were released to serve in World War I, hauntingly listing only their numbers and not their names. And an art exhibit commemorates the 30-odd cats that lived in the building and eventually had the run of the place when the prison closed.

In just about every prison tour, there seems to be at least one poster child whose bad behavior helps bolster ticket sales, and the more notorious, the better. Al Capone is featured at Eastern State. The Wyoming Territorial Prison Museum in Laramie, Wyo., which gets 20,000 visitors a year, highlights the fact that Butch Cassidy was imprisoned there for stealing horses.

Alcatraz has a particularly star-studded roster. It housed not only Capone, but Machine Gun Kelly and Robert Stroud, the famous Birdman who, according to the tour, was far more surly and manipulative than Burt Lancaster's character in the 1962 film “The Birdman of Alcatraz.”

People involved with the nation's prison tours have their own theories about why they are so appealing.

“Everyone has a macabre interest in what could occur if you don't stay on the right side of the law,” said Nicholette Phelps, director of visitor programs at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which includes Alcatraz. “We always think of what happens on the other side of that gate.”
Julie Smith, the business manager of the Old Prison Museum in Deer Lodge, Mont., which has about 45,000 visitors a year, thinks people are drawn by “the shock and horror” of the way inmates lived.

“It's like going by a car accident,” she said. “You can't help but look.”

 

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