Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site senior vice-president Sean Kelley said visitors “have been clamoring to get into this for years.”
He’s referring to Eastern State’s recently opened Cellblock 3, the castle-facade, former correctional institution’s medical wing, which had an operating room, a laboratory, a pharmacy, an X-ray lab, and a psychiatric department with cells with extra thick doors.
Severe deterioration of that corridor had kept the area off-limits to the public – except for the occasional hardhat tour that included the circa-1910 operating room – but a $200,000 series of stabilization projects has finally made it possible for visitors to safely step past the head gate – ornamented with a red cross – and enter the Hospital Block. Guided 15-minute tours are included with admission and available several times a day.
Some medical artifacts remain in place, despite decades of abandonment and decay. Eastern State closed in 1971.
Eastern State’s tour program supervisor, Matt Murphy, did the research behind the content for the new tours. At one point during a media preview event, he pointed out a “scary reminder of Eastern State’s early years” – a small, box-like feeding hole. Before most of them were removed from the cellblock walls, they were how guards delivered meals to inmates in solitary confinement. The system of strict silent solitary confinement was abandoned by 1913.
“This place is kind of a monument to human misery,” Murphy commented.
The tours take you back in time to when tuberculosis was a full-blown epidemic at Eastern State. It forced the prison to organize an in-house medical wing. Half of all the deaths – approximately 1,400 – behind the prison’s walls could be attributed to the disease, which used to be referred to as “consumption.”
“One of the youngest prisoners to ever come here, Mary Ash, was also probably the youngest person to die within the walls. She died from tuberculosis at the age of 13. Incarcerated for arson,” said Murphy.
Once the most expensive prison in the world, Eastern State opened in 1829. In the decades before widespread use of antibiotics, inmates with TB would be submerged in cold water in hydrotherapy rooms and exposed to sunlight in solarium cells, which you can see in Cellblock 3. “Most medical theory (of 100+ years ago) believed that fresh air, sunlight, special diet and moderate to mild exercise was the best treatment. Today doctors would not recommend exercise with tuberculosis,” Murphy said.
In the Eastern State operating room – which Murphy dubbed creepy and “rusty, crusty, Dr. Frankenstein-ey” – “Al Capone had his tonsils removed in 1929 and we think he also had a second procedure. It might have been a circumcision, which was being tested out as a possible remedy or prevention for syphilis.
At one point, they did 300 operations a year.”
The Hospital Block’s lab was used to research the “social diseases” gonorrhea and syphilis, which according to Murphy, were major health concerns at the turn of the 20th century.
New displays feature enlarged archive photos that show inmates participating in a blood drive during World War II, a staff member getting X-rayed to screen for tuberculosis, the prison’s doctors in 1958, and even a shot of boxing champion Max Baer (who you may remember as the antagonist from the movie “Cinderella Man”) in the prison’s recovery room visiting an incarcerated friend of his.
Audio tour content includes commentary related to the medical wing from people that worked at the prison and former inmates. One inmate, who served nine years, shares a harrowing story of being taken to the Hospital Block because of an eye injury he got in a knife fight with another inmate.
Let’s potty
During his remarks during media preview day, Kelley announced that Eastern State will at last be getting flush toilets. Re-opened as a museum more than 20 years ago, because of the prison’s inadequate plumbing system, the only on-site guest bathroom facilities are porta-potties. The irony is that Eastern State had indoor plumbing before the White House did.
What’s that?
Admission to Eastern State Penitentiary includes “The Voices of Eastern State” audio tour, narrated by actor Steve Buscemi; Hands-On History interactive experiences; history exhibits; and a series of artist installations. Eastern State has commissioned site-specific artist installations since 1995.
This year there are three new, and 11 returning, artist installations. The projects typically include perspectives on the contemporary American criminal justice system or the penitentiary’s past.
Erik Ruin and Gelsey Bell’s “Hakim’s Tale” is a multimedia work featuring formerly incarcerated activist Hakim Ali. The installation projects an animation of a paper-cut portrait of Ali, which is gradually obscured by strips of torn paper that are then slowly removed, symbolizing his loss of self and eventual regaining of it. In the accompanying audio, Ali recounts his experience of solitary confinement, and its spiritual and psychological effects.
In Jared Scott Owens’ “Sepulture” the artist pulls from his experiences to create a symbolic burial of an individual once incarcerated. A hieroglyph-covered, Egyptian style sarcophagus occupies a cell at Eastern State. The inmate’s belongings, also rendered in wood, are meant to symbolize the burial custom of burying personal items to keep the inmate’s soul satisfied in the afterlife.
Piotr Szyhalski and Richard Shelton’s “Unconquerable Soul” features overhead drone video with audio of prisoners reading poems that were written in prison cells.
