Welcome to Alcatraz - Part 1

The sky is blue, the sun is shining merrily and all seems right with the bright, clear world as we board our boat to Alcatraz. If you lived here, you might want to visit when the mist and fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean for a contrast and an eerie sense of atmosphere, but for a first-timer, the weather couldn’t be more perfect.

Arriving at the island, a sign announcing United States Penitentiary has been doctored to read ‘Indians Welcome, Indian Land’. I thought this was just a piece of graffito, but it turns out that Native Americans have occupied Alcatraz three times – the most effective beginning on November 20th 1969 and lasting for 19 months.

The Welcome to Alcatraz Island booklet explains, “Echoing the 1626 purchase of Manhattan Island, the Indians of All Tribes offered to buy Alcatraz from the federal government for $24 in beads, colored cloth and other trade goods. In The Proclamation to the Great White Father and all His People they noted that Alcatraz reminded them of an Indian reservation because, among other things, ‘it is isolated from modern facilities, the soil is rocky and unproductive, and the land does not support game’.”

We walk around the island – many areas are cordoned off to protect the seabirds. Some areas are rubble or burned – after the Indian occupation the government’s General Services Administration began bulldozing buildings, but this was stopped in 1972 when Alcatraz became part of the Golden Gate Nation Recreation Area.

There are gardens and plants flourishing which seems incongruous in such a hostile environment, but there are no rodents or other mammals to eat the vegetation. Before it was a prison, Alcatraz was a fort and then a military guard – the military planted things to keep the island’s new soil (especially imported from Angel Island) from sliding away. Later, garden privileges were highly sought after by the prisoners at Alcatraz.

I really like the lighthouse (that’s another one bagged!) which was the first on the Pacific Coast and has been in operation since 1854. From the top of ‘the rock’, there are great views over the harbour, back towards San Francisco and over the Golden Gate Bridge.

The audio tour is excellent, narrated by several of the prison guards and a handful of former inmates – one of whom came back to take a tour, just to see the warden’s house. Of course, the inmates believed in the escape-proof myth; the combination of tides and temperature made the water so treacherous. One of the inmates said, ‘Everything I want is a mile and a half away and I can’t get to it.’ But when they had been locked up for 15 years without visits or letters, what did they have to lose?

The audio tour describes many attempted escapes. Perhaps the most dramatic was that of the men who dug out of their cells with spoons and left heads made up of soap and hair on their pillows, which fell off when the officers touched them. These escapees were never found but presumed dead.

The officers claimed their days were boring, although a little eerie when patrolling the cells after lights out (9.30pm) with the sound of tears, grinding teeth, tossing and turning. The only guns were on the gun alley, not on the floor – even so, many officers were shot when an escape plan went wrong.

Even kitchenware was a murder weapon; three men got killed with kitchen knives (with a sound rather graphically described as ‘popslap’). The canteen or dining room was potentially the most dangerous place in the prison. The prisoners got (in addition to a roof over their heads) three meals a day – they were palatable, healthy, attractively served, and often spaghetti. Just in case the prisoners got sick of spaghetti, there were canisters of tear gas on hand.