1,016 Comments for Eastern State Penitentiary

Haviland designed it.
Dickens came to see it.

Over time they wedged new corridors among the old.

They did cover the skylights - years ago.
Probably un-covering them now.
These actually look pretty good.

never saw that

From the rotunda you can see down every corridor.

Wasn't expecting that
.................(though I guess I should have)

One idea offered was to use this bldg. as religeous cloistures....umm...............

HEY THERE! HI THERE! HO THERE!, your as welcome as can be!!

They used to have a band comprised of prisoners who would broadcast on the radio on Sunday in the 1940's and 1950's.

Still a fundamental prison right : The right to access Religeon.

They may have cleaned it up since,but sheets of plaster one inche thick HAD come down from the ceiling almost everywhere.For that reason and others hard hats were issued,( "it could spoil your day")and that is one sad memory I have:the one issued to my son who was about 12 at that time was oversized and was falling in his eyes.If I had known that I would have brought my own hard hat,as these were dirty.I tried to disinfect by putting paper in the head band. Also I should have tightened the inner band adjustment.Instead it was a distraction for him and I regret that memory.Many people took thier hardhats off and were using them to sit on.WE should have done that.

Again one of those amazing vaults.
Also amazing how they kept revising this bldg. thru the years.
Almost everything was made of stone,including the ornate parts.


TWELVE MONKEYS was shot there.

Most of the air and light was natural.
Little oblique diamond-shaped aperatures in each cell for air and light. No lamps.
What must of that been like on a rainy day?On a cold day?
Giant skylights overhead the length of every large corridor.

I often wonder what it would have been like.
You know, to serve a sentence there.
A long one?
A life-long one?
A sentence at a time when lives were shorter??

Keep in mind that no matter how harsh this looks, it was an improvement over what had been before.
The Quakers believe there is a little bit of GOD in everyone,and so,this is the house of the LORD.

All this is new to me from when I was there years ago.
Much of the rest of the prison is the same over and over again,so this works out well.

The pipes are for heat.
The utilities in the prison were state-of-the-art for the time.Each cell had a radiator.
Before those days they had a room with a giant fire in a furnace and they found a way to blow that through the prison via duct work.
Each cell had a cement toillette and prisoners found a way to use the poop pipe that ran under each corridor as a communication tube,until the prison began to leave the pipe flooded for days at a time.

Nah, I didn't get to go there.