Eastern State Penitentiary (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Repent-itentiary!

On an overcast and very warm June day, a couple of friends and I set off to explore the dank cavernous ruins of the first modern style prison: Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. This place is so cool, it’s been featured on MTV’s “Fear“! It’s so cool that it’s been on The Scariest Places On Earth! It’s so cool that I am going to memorialize it with a Travelogue!

Before I begin, let me tell you a bit about the prison itself. Eastern State Penitentiary was built by the good old Quakers back in 1829. You see, the Quakers started thinking that the best way to rehabilitate criminals was to isolate them from society, give them a Bible, and make them reflect long and hard on all the bad things they’ve done for a few years. The Bible will lead them back to the path of righteousness, and all will be well. So, with this is mind, ESP was built. It was the most expensive structure ever built in America at the time of its construction, and it was so famous around the world that Dickens stated it was one of the two things he most wanted to see when he visited the U.S. in 1842 (Niagara Falls being the other). The prison had a novel, highly influential design: a circular central area with seven spoke-like halls radiating outwards. This would allow a guard to stand in the central area and watch all of the halls at the same time. Many other prisons ended up adapting this design. The prisoners were never allowed to talk to or see one another – they were completely isolated from all human contact. They had private courtyards that they would be allowed to exercise in for a short time each day, but they would never be outside at the same time as their neighbors, so there was never any chance of conversation. They even made sure not to have exposed pipes so that prisoners couldn’t “knock” messages to one another. They were given a Bible and some needlework type tasks to do, and that was it. As you might imagine, quite a few people went insane after several years of this sort of thing… so they ended up deciding it wasn’t such a good idea after all, and the solitary confinement philosophy was officially abandoned in 1913. Since it was designed to be a solitary confinement prison, it didn’t work very well when they started intermingling the prisoners. The narrow halls allowed people walking by cells to be grabbed by prisoners and injured, among other problems. A lot of prisoners were killed or badly injured here – which explains its reputation for being haunted. The prison stayed in operation until 1971, when it was closed. It sat empty and decaying for over thirty years until it was opened as a museum in 1994. And here we are!

We ended up going on a nice guided tour of the prison, which takes you into some of the areas that they don’t let you wander around in by yourself. There are some areas that you are free to wander in alone, though. I figure I’ll just let the pictures do the talking… with captions, of course.

[slideshow_deploy id=’1212′]

Beside the gift shop area is a nice little museum that displays the original door to the prison and lots of interesting trinkets – like a confession of murder written in the inside of a drawer. Also, the visitation area is back there and they show videos of the history of the prison. It was very interesting and I took lots of pictures. Where are those pictures? Damned if I know!! When I went back to look at the pics a day later, I realized that many of them – including all the museum pics and some nice ‘flower in front of castle wall’ type pics – were missing. I guess I must have accidentally not transferred all the images from the camera. Talk about a sad moment in my life! Anyway, take my word for it, it’s all really quite interesting…

Eastern State Penitentiary – a wonderful place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there!

For more information on Eastern State Penitentiary, also see:
The Magnificent Official Site
Black Hoods And Iron Gags (interesting Historic Chronicle)

I would also recommend the following book of black and white photographs, which I purchased in the gift shop: