Brock's Adventures Day 5: The Rock
When the steel door clanged shut behind me, the cold reality of where I was hit me. I was on the Rock.
-Darwin E. Coon, Alcatraz inmate # 1422
For many years of my life, I had always had the plan to visit Alcatraz. Some people pondered in wonderment over the Eiffel Tower, while others took up a solitary interest in collecting miniature lighthouses. I, on the other hand, always took an interest in Alcatraz. For some reason, the little island in the San Francisco bay held more fascination for me then any other destination. True, Lighthouses and the Eiffel tower are grand, beautiful things. Alcatraz on the other hand was by all accounts a dank, cold and dark prison. Like I said, I was entrapped by it. Naturally then, I knew I had to visit it the second I set foot in San Francisco. Little did I know that it would prove easier said then done.
When we finally arrived in the actual city of San Francisco, I couldn’t help but be astonished by the city’s enormity. Buildings upon buildings, people flowing around people, San Francisco was by all means a gobbet of civilization packed within its own grimace. Yet, instead of opting to walk around the city and see the sights, we headed straight for the touristy Pier 39.
Allegedly, Pier 39 had some good restaurants, and more importantly, they had a ticket booth where you could purchase tickets to see Alcatraz. Accompanied by a quickly dissolving line, this Alcatraz ticket booth was selling tickets to the small island in a matter of seconds. By the time I stepped up to the booth, an employee informed me that trips to the island had been sold out clear into the next week and that in a few moments it’d be sold out into the week following that. The only possible tickets left cost sixty dollars a piece and included a tour of the entire bay area, with Alcatraz being merely a highlight of the tour. I was crushed. But in that moment of despair, I fully understood the irony of the situation. Years ago the island’s prisoners did everything in their power to escape Alcatraz. Now, in our day and age, there was a two-week wait and a sixty-dollar fee to get on the island.
After that muddled disappointment I sullenly had lunch at a seafood restaurant on the pier. Mockingly, my table was positioned to look out into the bay and directly at Alcatraz Island. Sitting down, eating my lunch and looking at that island was in many ways a dashing of my own personal hopes. The food as ok, but I wasn’t impressed. The shrimp pizza that I ordered tasted rather bland, the strawberry punch too sweet, and the wooden chair seemed to dig into my back. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have brooded upon those minor discomforts in a normal situation. In fact, there was nothing truly wrong with the food or the accommodations. I was just unsatisfied with the whole ordeal. It didn’t help to be sitting there watching the Island’s lighthouse blink through the fog, a subtle reminder that somewhere out in the bay my ideal destination existed, and I couldn’t visit it.
There was one more ace up my sleeve to play though, and while it was a long shot, I had to try it. When I was walking along the pier glancing in the shop windows my family pointed out a little travel company to me. Nestled in the upper recesses of the pier, this travel company was really just a little booth similar to the one that had left me in my dejected state. Unlike that booth however, this dainty little den had no one standing in front of it. When I finally strode up to the counter and asked about tickets to Alcatraz I was greeted by a woman with a thickly slurred Ukrainian accent.
“You want to go to Rock, no? I get you there. Is 45 dollars. You go to Chinatown too.”
As it turned out, that little booth (manned by a Ukrainian family) was really just a ticket holding company that set aside passes for foolish tourists like myself. Usually, someone buys tickets to Alcatraz and either neglects to show up or a last minute emergency gets in the way. Likewise, this little company had anticipated the fact that some tourists wouldn’t be able to purchase tickets to Alcatraz through the main distribution company. Regarding that they had systematically purchased a number of tickets and were selling them for a slightly higher price.
Although it wasn’t exactly cheep, the little travel agency managed to get us tickets for that very day. Included in the deal was also a tour of Chinatown that we could go on whenever we wanted. We decided to hold off on Chinatown until later on in the trip, but we had to be at Alcatraz in less then an hour.
We made our way down to the pier as soon as we got the tickets, but as we came closer we noticed that at one of the numerous gift shops stationed around the dock there was a man signing books. As I came closer to that gift shop I noticed that the man selling and signing books was in all truth a former inmate of Alcatraz, Darwin E. Coon. Darwin’s book, entitled “Alcatraz, the True End of the Line” followed his exploits in crime and his stay in the notorious prison. Even more enticing, his book delved into some of the shadier characters that were kept at that prison, like the infamous Birdman, Robert Stroud. I figured that I needed something to read while I was there in San Francisco, and what better subject then a book on Alcatraz? So I purchased a copy and had him sign it…
“To Brock”
After standing there and talking with him for a little while he started to divulged some interesting facts about Alcatraz history, including how he was in one of the final groups of prisoners to be ushered off the island upon its closing. I thought it was fascinating that he had been in one of the final groups of prisoners to be taken off Alcatraz, but to him he relished the fact that he had been the island’s cook. “They always asked me to make spaghetti,” he reflected, “So I made spaghetti”. After hearing some of his experiences and getting him to sign my book I boarded the agency’s tour boat along with two of my brothers, Chase and Parker and our younger aunt Charyssa, and left for Alcatraz.
Once I was on the boat I headed up to the railing at the top to get a good glance of the ocean. It was a foggy day in San Francisco, and most of the bay was engulfed in a white haze. In a matter of minutes the dock we had previously been at had disappeared and nothing but the sea remained before our view. After a time we began to see the outlines of land in the distance. Little by little this land came into view and suspended above it was the consistent blinking of the lighthouse’s beacon. As the boat came closer, the land, enshrouded by the fog, revealed itself to be that tiny prison island I had wanted to visit ever since learning about it: Alcatraz.
As we approached the island I noticed some graffiti sprayed along the entrance to the barracks around the U.S. Penitentiary seal that read, “Indians welcome, Indian Land”. (Just to point out as a side point of interest, Native Americans occupied Alcatraz for 19 months starting on November 20th, 1969. It’s widely regarded as a cornerstone of the Native American efforts to regain their land.) Once we docked we quickly began our ascent up the hill towards the island’s peak. Walking along I noticed that there were ramps of stairs and walkways that cut into the island’s hill and led up towards the top of the island. Upon a closer inspection of these stairs (and some timely information later on) I found out that most of these structures were unsafe. Sure enough, tiny cracks and fissures marked the concrete, and gathered dust and rocks denoted that very few people had (currently) walked along those paths.
Eventually we reached the island’s magnum opus, the cell-house. The cell-house was an interesting aspect to the island’s architecture, especially because it was one of the buildings that remained standing (most of the other buildings, such as the warden’s quarters were gutted out by a voracious fire on the island long ago). Nothing more then a square shaped box, the cell-house stood atop the hill as a subtle reminder to the island’s visitors of what Alcatraz once was. Naturally, it was the center of the tour. When we came into the building tour guides handed out tape players and then directed us to the innards of the cell-house and the starting point of the island’s tour, a red line painted on the floor. Once we crossed the line, we started our tape players and began to listen to the history (and horrors) behind Alcatraz.
In retrospect, I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself as much if I hadn’t had that tape to listen to. I’d still be engaged, but hearing prisoners and correctional officers utter details about the island as I walked about the cell-house was indeed a treat. As we stalked around the gloomy prison the tape directed us to cells and historic positions along the way. The first of these things pointed out to us was the main hallway of the cell-house that the prisoners coined “Broadway”. Some inmates on the tape spoke of Broadway in a fond tone, while others seemed rattled by their past experiences on it. Most all of the prisoners though shared hushed stories about the gun galleries that faced either end of the two main cell blocks, Block B and C. These caged structures lying against the wall overlooked all of the prisoners and had been armed with numerous forms of weaponry during Alcatraz’ occupation. From here correctional officers could look out upon the cell-house and see any and everything a prisoner attempted to do. One point of interest during the tour was hearing the tape divulge the gory details of a violent escape attempt involving the gun galleries. Using metal sickles, one prisoner bent the bars the bars of the gallery and shimmied his way through, managing to get a hold of some guns in the process. After releasing some of his fellow inmates, the rioters then proceeded to lock up correctional officers in one of the cells. When the cell got full of officers, the prisoner would simply stroll over to it and open up on the officers with a machine gun. Along the floors of the cell house and on some of the walls were scorch marks that had been left over from that particularly nasty riot. When things got out of hand and the prisoners had reign of the cell-house, the island’s warden (Warden Johnson) called in army generals Frank Merill and Joe Stillwell to regain control of the situation. With equally violent tact, the two generals landed eighty-four marines on the island that then proceeded to bombard the cell-house with bazookas and grenades. This effort to “subdue” the prisoners resulted in the aftertaste of the cell-house’s scorch marks.
After showing us this gritty bit of history the tape guided us towards Alcatraz’ mess hall and kitchen. Gray and barren, the mess hall was known to be the most dangerous place on the island, as many prisoners would expel their frustrations during this period at the cost of guards or other inmates. With this in mind we were instructed to look up and take note of several canisters that lined the roof of the room. These canisters had been filled with tear gas just in case a deadly riot broke out in the mess hall. Although several riots took place in the mess hall, those canisters had never been triggered. Several of the tape’s commentators, both prisoners and guards alike expressed their belief that if they released the tear gas, any correctional officer inside the mess hall at the time wouldn’t make it out alive. Instead, they simply approached any riot with a quick blast from a shotgun and a stout order that the prisoners march back to “Broadway” immediately.
The kitchen was a particularly interesting piece of the island’s history though, because most prisoners reminisced that despite being a dank and cold place, Alcatraz always had fantastic food. One of those riots though was instigated by the island’s food, an item that for a time continued to show up on the prisoner’s plate day in and day out.
“We all told one another that if that damned spaghetti showed up one more time we would riot. So we went into the mess hall the next day and we looked down, and it was the damned spaghetti.”
Other highlights of the tour included showing us where some of Alcatraz’ most notorious prisoners’ cells were. Machine Gun Kelly was one of those diminutive figures, a character noted for being extremely dangerous. Although the tour did point out a location that was believed to be Al Capone’s cell, no one knows for sure where the famous gangster was kept. I guess it didn’t really matter though since he spent most of his time on the island in a hospital isolation cell. The tape did happen to point out the cells of the three men to ever escape Alcatraz, John Anglin, Clarence Anglin and Frank Lee Morris. The back walls of their cells was unlike the other prisoner’s cells in that each one had a hole burrowed through the reinforced concrete that led out of the island. The cells, still dressed up with paintings and blankets, also had the dummy heads of each prisoner lying snugly against a pillow. Those dummy heads were constructed by hair collected at the prison’s barbershop and actually looked quite realistic. With flushed cheeks and pink skin, I could see how they were mistaken as the visages of the escapees. Once the prisoners had escaped through the narrow tunnels they used simple raincoats to float across the bay and to land. To this day those three prisoners remain unaccounted for. Most historians and correctional officers believe that they simply drowned in San Francisco’s bay… Of course, most of the prisoners boasted with great pride that they were pretty sure that the Anglins and their companion had made it to shore and freedom.
There were so many different aspects to that tour that I now recall fondly. All I can say is that Alcatraz was well worth the money spent and that it lived up to my personal fascination. It was when we left the island on the final tour boat that I realized another great irony. Years ago prisoners were over joyous to leave that darkened hellhole, but in this day and age, I was rather saddened.
