As we transverse the journey that is this wonderful existence it’s not unusual to look back on our challenges and adventures. But too often we don’t look through our lens back into times and places and lessons before we came into being. Our lens has a tendency to be a telescope, rather than a wide angle, looking only at things that affect us directly. So when I compile my bucket list items I make sure there are some wide angles in there to keep my mind always thinking and considering and engaged. Well, in the planning stages anyway. I really need organizational help!
I prefer night driving on long trips. Less traffic, much easier to change lanes in all the right places when the GPS fails to tell me soon enough. This will come into play in the next few incidents. But for tonight it’s smooth sailing into the silky darkness. Just me and the white line darts flashing by on my left, yellow ribbon sliding along on my right, until I reached the far side of Maryland. They have excellent rest stops, big and well serviced and clean and monitored. A good place to grab a few hours of rest when your head gets heavy.
The next destination on my list was Eastern State Penitentiary and the Mutter Museum in Pennsylvania. These are both located in Philadelphia, which is a very old city, but a city nonetheless. Now for this mountain girl, this is a little intimidating. City traffic and massive highways give me the willies more than any haunted location every will.
I arrived at 5:15 in the morning. To abandoned streets. The Mutter Museum address was right there on the way in, but the parking on that street was blocked off for construction. That’s when I noticed it. A city full of wall to wall cars along every street. No people. For a city it was strangely abandoned at an hour that I would have expected it to be waking up and the traffic to start moving. Looking at the traffic patterns, that was good for me, because that would not have been a fun dodge game with moving targets to interact with.
Now I have a bit of a fear of being hit trying to navigate in traffic from a recent accident - not my fault - but which I ended up paying for anyway since it was an uninsured motorist. Of course it was, because in a city of so many people and cars - the nearest home city where I work - I couldn’t have an interaction with one that had good coverage. So I was dreading later when I’d have to do this waltz with other drivers.
I was in what I’d consider downtown, but which I’d later find wasn’t quite. I drove straight up the street for a number of blocks, just looking at the amazing old architecture. At the end of 22nd street I was pleased to find myself at the feet of Eastern State Penitentiary.
Eastern State is an abandoned prison that was built in the Gothic Revival Architectural style. It stretches over 11 acres and was opened in 1829 as a revolutionary advancement in punishment and recovery of morals. Once the most famous and expensive prison in the world, it was considered an architectural wonder. With running water and central heat as well as indoor flush plumbing it even beat the White House in the latest advances. It would go on to attract attention from all over the world as a model for the future.
It was also the first true penitentiary as it was designed to inspire penitence, or true regret. Crime had come to be seen as a moral disease. A title penned by Dr. Benjamin Rush, who would come to be known as the father of American psychiatry for his observations of diseases of the mind. This would also lead him to an interest in the state of punishment.
Jails were, at this point, holding pens while judgment and punishment was pending. Often the punishment was swift and harsh. Hanging, branding, ear cropping, dunking, public stocks and whipping posts located on town greens were the popular end results for many judicial decisions. These holding areas were abhorrent with no protection for those in them. Well known for their violence, no heat, often no shelter and violence that went unchecked within. One was as likely to die from the conditions in the holding pens as from the punishment. Many froze to death. Did I mention they were pens? Of people? All people; women, men, children (often street orphans) with the weakest at the whim of the strongest.
Eastern State was the collective answer to these problems. It would become known as the Pennsylvania system. Rather than being a holding place, it was the punishment. A "house of repentance" where prisoners could meditate on their crimes, experience spiritual remorse and undergo rehabilitation…(Woodham, Smithsonian, Pg 1).” Each prisoner was isolated in a small space, because reflection and penance couldn’t be accomplished while in contact with others. Their only interaction was with guards through a small feeding slot. They were assigned tasks, such as shoe repair or weaving to occupy their time.
Their only possession? A bible.
Three hundred prisons worldwide would be built based on this shining example of progress. (I hope you can hear the sarcasm in that statement, though in all honesty for the time it was an improvement physically at least.) However, the whole world wasn’t blind. “Charles Dickens, after his visit in 1842, wrote critically: "I am persuaded that those who designed this system... do not know what it is they are doing... I hold the slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body, (Woodham, Smithsonian, Pg. 2).”
These morals and goals would fall by the wayside for several reasons. Overpopulation would drive it to go from housing 300 to housing 2000. There were multiple to a cell designed for one. The idea of isolation did turn out to be a special kind of torture that would eventually come to be seen for what it was, detrimental to the psyche. Over its history it housed 75,000 inmates including the notorious Al Capone. It was declared a historic landmark in 1965, but wasn't officially closed by the state until 1971. In 1994 the decision was made to open the building as a historic site after demolition was considered and then turned down. Why the history lesson you might ask? Keep reading.
What you don’t hear about is who those imprisoned were. Even in my research prior to my visit I didn’t get the whole story. Those subjected to this “new way of thinking” weren’t just murders or rapists, but also people who’d committed crimes of desperation, just trying to feed children or themselves. There were crimes as basic as adultery, which didn’t require much actual evidence to land you here if you were a woman. Prostitution, idleness and blasphemy could also land you in a court. But most notable were those who committed no crime but the ones against the societal norm.
Keep in mind we’re talking about a time when just being different was a crime. Born dual? (There are a whole group of intersex conditions - a group of medical issues where orientation is confused by having elements of both sexes biologically or chemically.) Crime.
Gay? Crime.
Like to dress up as the opposite sex? Crime.
Just being the wrong “kind” of person in a society that knew what they wanted and didn’t tolerate anything outside their definition of normal. Should you spend years in isolation just because you were born the way you were?
Crimes that were minor in nature were grouped with serious categories as a form of proactive action. Many of the offenses here would have put the pillars of society themselves in such straits, had they not had the standing for society to look the other way. Until they offended the wrong pocket book anyway.
Eastern State also has a reputation for being haunted. If it is, its ghosts have many reasons to hold grievances. Whether by spirits or not, it’s most certainly haunted by its past. Not only for the prisoners housed there, but also the guards and other staff who worked at the facility. Definitely the wardens. For the environment of a prison doesn’t just hold those in the cells prisoner to its violence, isolation and mental degradation. Both sides are trapped in its walls day to day, month to month, year after year, witnessing and living with the negative environment breed within.
The prison banks on both its definitions of haunted by holding tours and haunted houses and letting photographers and ghost hunters alike wander the halls.
It all goes to funding the historic site and I’m okay with that. We do not teach history. I find myself saying that a lot these days. And we are quickly forgetting. That’s one reason I so frequently include it wherever I can. It’s apt to be an expensive lesson in our near future. For if we forget the past we will repeat it. There are lessons to be learned and if we don’t learn them we get to repeat the lesson over and over again until we - as a civilization and a society - get the point.
This location holds interest for me, however, and it’s been on the list for a long time. The reasons have changed over the years as I have aged and matured. Curiosity, history, architecture, a morbid interest certainly. I’m going right by it, I can’t resist. The photographer in me loves, loves, loves abandoned locations. They hold textures and grit and interest as they are slowly deteriorating and nature is doing her best to move it along.
As photography goes it creates a rare opportunity to create images that move you for reasons that you don’t always understand. Then there is the history nerd in me. And maybe even still a little- okay, a lot- of the Wednesday Adams in me all grown up living my best life, doing what makes my weird little heart happy.
This historic location was the thing in its day, but a horror show from our own lens looking back in time. The stout, looming towers made in the style of middle age fortresses, the large stone insurmountable obstacles, could easily stand a millennia untouched. The shell looks much as it must have when it was in use. The inside, however, is a different story. It’s ironic that the cell walls and ceilings are crumbling and disintegrating. Large roots make their way into the crumbling mortar, dig deep and do their best to pulverize its offensive existence.
The numbers that once graced each door are worn and falling off, in many cases completely gone. Fading and forgotten as are the prisoners (there were both men and women here) that each represented. It’s an inescapable symbolism for both the individuals and the history that it all represents. History has a way of being relevant in the most twisted ways at the most unexpected times.
Here we are in the twenty-first century and we are steadily being dragged backward in time with a tide as old as civilization itself. Progress being pulled across the sands digging for handholds we aren’t able to find. It feels like the receding of the water before a tsunami rushes in to destroy everything in its wake. We need to find a way to change the world view back to a wide angle lens. It’s interesting that in old cities like this one there are places that remind us so boldly of that.
