Sixty years since Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary permanently closed – and 50 years since it reopened to the public as a museum – Ellie Seymour pays an immersive visit to San Francisco’s atmospheric prison island and discovers why it’s still one of the best and quirkiest museums in the US.
“Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary – or The Rock as it was nicknamed – held only 275 prisoners when it was full,” booms our tour guide, Brian Bechtel, through a hand-held radio linked to a mini megaphone clipped to his belt. He wears a khaki-green prison-guard-style outfit: chino trousers and a short-sleeved shirt. Behind him are a giant, rusty water tower and the crumbling remains of a concrete building reclaimed by nature – and plenty of seabirds.
“It opened in 1934 and was home to the most dangerous and disruptive in the United States federal prison system. These were the guys who caused riots. The real troublemakers. There was one guard for every three prisoners. Nowadays, there’s one to 50.”
Huddled around him, a crowd of eager tourists, listening intently to his anecdote-seasoned potted history of Alcatraz Island, some for the first time, others, like me, a second time years later. All of us are fresh off the morning Alcatraz City Cruise from Pier 33, 1.5 miles across the famously foggy San Francisco Bay. We’d disembarked where inmates once had and follow Brian up to the cellhouse building as he talks. It’s an exciting and immersive start to a visit to Alcatraz.
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Great escapes
Despite the heavy guard presence, escape attempts were frequent, Brian tells us, with 14 in 29 years. The most well-known took place in 1962 – a year before the prison closed – inspiring the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz. In this famous escape, trio Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin chipped through the concrete cell walls with sharpened spoons and got out through an air vent.
“They built a raft out of 50 stolen raincoats,” Brian explains, adding that the three prisoners sewed rectangle-shaped pieces of the fabric into tubes using stolen thread, gluing them together using stolen glue and building homemade paddles out of scrap lumber. They escaped at the south end of the building and were never seen again. “We never saw the bodies or the raft. What really happened, we don’t know,” Brian muses.
New beginnings
Alcatraz Island closed as a prison 60 years ago in 1963, because having a prison on a desert island is expensive to run. Everything had to be brought in by boat, from food and water to bullets. Brian tells us that when the prison closed, a caretaker carried on living here with his wife and son. “He still had the newspaper delivered every day by his friend, the KGO radio traffic helicopter pilot.”
The island sat abandoned for 10 years until the US National Park Service bought it in 1972, opening the prison as a public museum in 1973. With its atmospheric setting, notorious history, well-informed guides and immersive audio tour, it continues to attract 1.5 million visitors a year.
We enter the Alcatraz cellhouse building through the dark and echoey basement shower block, as an inmate would, but rather than relinquish our belongings and strip off for a compulsory brisk wash, we collect an audio tour headset and ascended a narrow flight of metal steps.
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Immersive experience
The award-winning audio tour is the star of the Alcatraz Island museum show, bringing a walk around the cellhouse to life. Starting on a corridor at the north of B and C blocks, nicknamed Times Square by inmates, you follow the story of Pat Mahoney, who served four years on the dock and guides you around the prison in an authoritative thick American drawl.
Backdropping the narrative interspersed with tales from ex-inmates: echoing sounds of a guard’s heavy footsteps, the jangling of keys, heavy cell doors banging shut, prisoners’ rowdy shouts, water lapping the island, the sound of seagulls and a distant boat’s foghorn across the bay.
If it wasn’t for everyone around me dressed in their own modern-day clothes, it would be easy to pretend we’ve all been time-warped to the 1920s and incarcerated on Alcatraz Island, itching to see daylight after days in solitary confinement. An audio tour highlight is, of course, standing on Michigan Avenue – between A and B blocks – on the morning of the famous 1962 escape, when the guards make the dreaded discovery, sounding the alarm to shouts of panic.
Taste of freedom
So good is the award-winning Alcatraz Island audio tour, it’s over before I know it, and I'm in daylight again, contemplating life behind bars on a hike around the island’s seasonal 0.7-mile Agave Trail. It’s so-called after the spiky succulent planted by prison guards and their families, creating a horticultural fence that deterred would-be escapee accomplices from landing boats on the island.
I follow the stone-lined path through a eucalyptus grove down to within a few feet of the water’s edge, to take in the view of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, lush Marin County to the north and nearby Angel Island – a California state park – remembering what Brian had told us earlier: “Look out in San Francisco Bay as you may see sea lions, harbour porpoises, a whale spout – or, if you’re lucky, an old raft made out of 50 raincoats.”
Getting there
Alcatraz Day Tour tickets start at $28 (£22) with City Experiences. Flights from London airports to San Francisco International Airport start from £577 return with United Airlines. Our writer travelled with America As You Like It and stayed at the 1 Hotel San Francisco and the San Francisco Proper.
For more information visit San Francisco Travel and Visit California.
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Main image: f11photo/Shutterstock