Lockdown!

No, the FBI haven't finally caught up with me.  This is a post about Eastern State Penitentiary, which we got the chance to check out while we were in the Philadelphia area.  ESP was the first penitentiary and was once the most famous and expensive prison in the world, housing some of the most notorious inmates like Al Capone and the bank robber Willie Sutton.

A huge, Gothic, fortress-like structure, it imposed on the landscape on the outskirts of Philadelphia like an intimidating reminder to the citizens below of what would happen to them if they veered from the straight and narrow.

I checked the map and decided that it would be OK to drive there as it's located out of town and apparently has a large visitor car park nearby.

Except that Philadelphia has obviously grown since the construction of the building in 1829 and has simply expanded around it, so it's no longer out of town. With a couple of wrong turns thrown in to the bargain, our route to the penitentiary ended up looking like this:

So we ended up getting pretty intimate with the city centre without even leaving the RV.  When things like this happen, you reassure yourself that if trucks can get there to make deliveries, you should be able to as well.  And then you meet one of those trucks coming the other way down a narrow street and immediately spot the catch with that line of reasoning.

When  we eventually got there we were pleased to find that the car park indeed had plenty of spaces to accommodate us.  Not so pleasing was the fact that the entrance was too narrow to let us reach those spaces.  We ended up driving all the way out again and getting public transport back in.  Fun!

It was worth all the effort though to get the chance to walk around this intriguing place.  ESP revolutionised the prison system; every inmate was held in solitary confinement and that isolation was supposed to encourage them to reflect on their crimes in the hope that they would feel "penitence" for what they had done.

Technologically it was way ahead of its time, featuring central heating, running water and flush toilets.  These were things that even the president didn't have in the White House at that time, just to put it into perspective.

Its "hub-and-spoke" layout maximised separation of prisoners and economised on space.

It also enabled efficient control and observation of inmates, thanks to angled mirrors placed in the hub section which allowed individual guards to patrol several corridors at once.

It's fascinating walking down the eerie "spokes" and staring into the cells:

Don't drop the soap!

Its medical facilities were also some of the most advanced in the world, with inmates from other prisons often transferred in for complicated procedures.

That's me not visiting the dentist for another 10 years then!

Al Capone did a stretch here in relative comfort following his first appearance in front of a judge in 1929.  The reconstruction of his cell shows the extra comforts that his celebrity at the time afforded him:

A dramatic escape plot unfolded in 1945, when a group of inmates including Willie Sutton dug 15ft down and 97ft out from one of their cells to freedom, using tools made by the main instigator, Clarence Klinedinst.  The pictures show the entrance to the tunnel in Clarence's cell:

And the line they took to the outside wall:

Most of the escapees were re-captured within a day.  The final one, James Grace, turned up a week later asking to be let back in.  His reason?  He was hungry!

The solitary confinement system eventually collapsed due to overcrowding and opposition from its critics, who claimed that the isolation was too barbaric.  The facility was eventually closed in 1971.

The audio tour you can take while you're there (narrated by Steve Buschemi no less) features commentary by several of the inmates, some of whom were transferred out when it closed and are still incarcerated elsewhere today.

Once we'd made our own escape from the prison gates, we headed straight for a restaurant down the road called the Firehouse, where I had one of the best burgers I've ever had in my life (and trust me, that's a pretty big sampling pool!).  Shame it wasn't around in James Grace's day, he would have lasted longer than a week in the outside world.

Suitably stuffed, we made our way back to our own brand of solitary confinement for the night, the RV!