Alcatraz -5 feet wide, 9 feet deep and 7 feet high

  San Francisco, California, United States
Saturday, September 1, 2007

8am my alarm went off this morning - so much for a year off work and no need to get out of bed early!! I had kinda timed how long it took to walk to pier 33 yesterday and it was about 45minutes but me being me decided that I would allow myself at least an hour and a half. I had tickets for the 10.30am ferry so my plan was to be out of the hostel at 9am to give me plenty of time to meander down to the pier but things never really go to plan especially when you're sharing a shower with god knows how many other people!!

Anyway I made it with time to spare and got my ticket off the most miserable looking ticket attendant ever who told me to go stand in the line with the hundreds of other people which I did only to be told, after standing in the line for 20 minutes, that it was the line for the 10am ferry and that I shouldn't be in it! The guy was real nice though and told me to stand with a few other people who had obviously also been standing in the wrong line and he would let us through first. The other people were really cool a family from Texas whose opinion of San Francisco was that it was nice as cities go but there were "too many big buildings in a small place and far too little open land" I guess coming from Texas everywhere is gonna seem cramped! They were really nice and I spent a long time talking to the daughter who is almost finished her law degree and trying to explain that we don't have a written constitution in England and that lots of things change through case law which she found hard to grasp her comment was "how do you keep up with all the changes then?"

So the ferry trip out to Alcatraz is pretty short maybe 10 minutes max but its pretty cold and windy on the upper deck but the views are great. I had a lot of preconceived ideas about Alcatraz which is a familiar thing with me and something that I need to work on (too much research into certain things can lead to disappointment!) not that I was disappointed with Alcatraz it just was different to what I was expecting.

I guess that my first impression was "wow" as soon as you step off the ferry you are in front of a huge building that from the outside looks exactly as it would have done when the prison was still in existence except obviously its a bit shabby on the outside from general wear and tear. The actual prison is right at the top of the rock. This building is the apartments/barracks of the 90 guards that worked at Alcatraz at any one time together with their wives and children (there were never any female guards) but women and children lived and worked on the rock. Unfortunately the only accessible bit is the very ground floor, the rest of the building inside has pretty much fallen apart (like a lot of the buildings on the island) which is such a shame. It would be great if they could restore them to how they were it wold be so much more of an experience but when I asked one of the rangers he said that the problem with restoration work is that it can damage some of the historical features of the buildings but most of the buildings that are left are just shells which will probably fall down by themselves within the next few years if they don't do something so I don't understand the hesitation...

                               

The Appartment/barrack building

Climbing up to the cell block is, apparently, the equivalent of climbing up 13 storeys of stairs - its slopes though so it doesn't feel so bad and there is plenty to look at on the way up - most of the people on the ferry seemed like they were having a race to get to the cell block for the audio tour so I kinda thought if I meander up they'll be less people when I get to the top. I know that the island is part of the San Francisco National Park which incorporates a bird sanctuary and if you didn't realise it before you started walking up the slope you wold as you get to the top because everything is absolutely covered in bird poo and it stinks - the main birds that I saw were seagulls (western gulls apparently) god only knows why they need a sanctuary. I said to one of the rangers that they cull the gulls where I live because they create such a mess and are a health hazard and he nearly choked on his coffee! I think some serious action needs to be taken about the gulls before they completely destroy everything - the poo was everywhere and made everything look disgusting.

There are quite a lot of other birds living on the island and of course the island was named after the pelicans which live there (I think they said that Alcatraz means pelican or bird in Italian) and there are also black cormorants but the gulls were the predominant ones and the messy ones!!

The cell tour is really good its all done on an audio tape narrated by one of the former guards with some snippets from prisoners. I think they sometimes have former prisoners there but today they had a lady called Jolene who grew up on Alcatraz as a child and has done research on all the inmates and written several books - she was doing some talks on the attempted escapes which were pretty interesting.

 

Looking up to the cell block

 

The garden of the guard house

The cells are so small its quite shocking - I didn't go in but you can and lots of people did. There isn't an eerie feeling about the place but I think thats because there are always so many people about I can't say that I would want to be out there on my own though or at night. I think the biggest thing about Alcatraz is the reputation that it has which was doused by the huge secrecy surrounding it during the time that it operated. It was a high security prison which housed the odd "big name criminals" like Al Capone and the guy who liked birds but other than that it was all speculation by the public about what went on there which gained it its " notorious reputation" .


I'd say that its definitely worth a visit I just wished that they had restored more of the buildings (lots of them were destroyed by a fire and only shells remain) it would make it so much more of an experience but maybe they will one day - a guy I was chatting to said that he had been 7 years ago and they had done loads to the place since then so I guess there is still hope.....

I've uploaded some pictures but I'm having a few issues with not being able to access all the pictures I have on Iphoto so these are not the best but are all I can upload at the moment!!