Alcatraz

The world's most famous gangster was incarcerated at the world's most famous prison. Their names? Al Capone and Alcatraz (or if you prefer...Al Catraz). Coincidence? I don't think so.

Or maybe it is. After all, the island was named more than a century before the gangster was born, and as far as I know, no one refers to the island as "Al"...or even as "Scarface".

It was actually named by the first Spaniard to discover the island—Juan Manuel de Ayala—who in 1775 named the island "La Isla de los Alcatraces," which translates as "The Island of the Pelicans." (He later discovered that he should have named it after his wife, but that's another story. Although when you think about it, having an angry wife isn't all that different from being sentenced to jail, so maybe the whole thing works out after all.)

Anyway, the thought was that an island in the middle of the bay would be a good place to keep criminals, since there aren't that many machine-gun-toting bootleggers who also happen to be good swimmers, and the distance to shore would render them docile and cooperative. Didn't really work out that way—there were still a multitude of escape attempts. In fact, the prison was finally closed because it cost too darn much to run the place, what with all the guards and food and stuff they had to ship out there by ferry. So the bad guys were eventually relocated from San Francisco Bay to a prison in Flourissant, Colorado, which doesn't even have a moat.

I know a bunch of folks who have made the swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco. There is a triathlon there every year that starts with a swim from the island to the mainland. It's not a particularly tough swim for an experienced open-water athlete...but everyone knows that swimmers are the most righteous and upstanding of citizens, and role models for all of society—so comparing them to criminals is a silly thing to do, anyway. I can honestly say that I do not know a single swimmer who has been convicted of bootlegging.

Anyway, I had the chance to tour the island, and enjoyed it all very much. I won't bore you with additional history of the island, since you can look that up on other sites, but will share with you my personal observations. Here they are:

• The Park Service probably doesn't have to pay their employees all that much, since they get to wear those really cool ranger hats.



• Rather than raising taxes all the time, the government should just charge people to tour more creepy old prisons and stuff -- there were thousands of tourists there, and at $26 a head, that's like a million dollars or something. Think how much money you could make if you ran tours through a prison that wasn't all empty and broken down! Am I right?



• The audio tour (with individual headsets) is a great idea. But the trick is to push the "start" button when nobody else is ready to go. I started mine at the same time as 6 other people, so we were constantly moving at exactly the same time. They had some nice sound effects work, though, from riots to clanging doors, to plaintive dueling banjo backgrounds; it all added up to give the tour a rather haunting and creepy mood.



• One of the audio tour narrators (a former prisoner) said that the worst thing about being incarcerated there was being able to look across the bay and see the bright lights and bustle of downtown San Francisco. He said that he could almost hear the joy in partying voices along the waterfront on the mainland, and the desire to leave the sterile drudgery of life on "The Rock" provided plenty of incentive to go straight after serving his term. Living a lonely and solitary life while watching the activity in a great and exciting city across the bay must've been torment indeed. But I'm thinking that showering nekkid in a long trough with a bunch of remorseless criminals might be even worse than that.



• OR...it could be the decor.
  
  No, it's not the green that I object to. ...All right, it is, partly, but I could learn to live with that. After all, our family home's basement was painted that color when I was growing up, and while my exposure to that particular hue may have been responsible for my brief flirtation with becoming a hippie in the late 60s, I eventually turned out OK.
  
  No, my objection to the interior design of the Alcatraz prison cell lies more in the feng shui aesthetics. One should not have any part of one's bed less than three feet from the 'loo.
  
  And who cleans the place, anyway? Does a petite Nicaraguan woman politely knock on the bars each day and say "Housekeeping", before using her master key to enter? Or is there one community toilet brush and a container of Lysol cleanser that makes its way down the cell block once a week? I can imagine hearing: "C'mon, Capone, quit bogarting the blue goo!" And for that matter, wouldn't you want to schedule your, um, "business" at times when the guards weren't likely to be walking down the aisle? Talk about privacy issues! It's all pretty well designed to make you NOT want to live there, I guess.
  
  Anyway, the audio tour did not answer any of those delicate hygiene questions, so I cannot pass the info along to you. Sorry.

I did enjoy the tour. And other than the idea of gangster ghosts haunting the hallways, I thought the island had a certain rugged charm. I got some pretty decent exercise walking all over the place, and had fun listening to the other tourists commenting about which of their in-laws they'd like to see incarcerated, etc. The Park Service staff was surprisingly cheerful given the morbid surroundings, and the bay breezes added that special sealife scent that you just don't get as a tourist in Colorado. But there was one bizarre element...and I'm not talking about the "fake head in the bed" escape attempt. I'm talking about the fact that somebody thought it was a good idea to have a San Francisco theater troupe perform a live enactment of "Hamlet" right there on the island. "Shakespeare on the Rock", they called it, and sure enough, if you removed your prison-tour headphones, you could hear cries of "Alas, poor Yorick", and "There's the rub!" echoing among the corridors of Cell Block C. Geez.

I know my English teachers will roll over in their graves to hear this...but I'm simply not a big Shakespeare fan. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's a complete waste of time to read any literary works that pre-date Mark Twain. (And it's pretty much a vast wasteland between Twain and Asimov, too, for that matter.) So when I'm wandering around a prison complex imagining the lives of various organized crime kingpins, I really have no desire to hear a bunch of self-impressed thespians shouting of the appeal of nunneries and the stench of Denmark. And if roving gangs of costumed actors weren't enough, they were accompanied by a small brass band that screeched so badly it made the island's rabbits jump into the water and swim for the mainland. And where is it written that outdoor Shakespeare must be performed with accents normally reserved only for Renaissance Fairs? Ugh.

Oh well. The good news is that I eventually made my own escape from the island relaxing on a pleasant ferryboat ride, and then had a wonderful time back on the shores of San Francisco. I would highly recommend the trip, and may share some more thoughts about my experiences in the Bay Area in the future. For now, I'll just leave you with a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge from the top of Coit Tower, and my sincere hopes that your only experiences with jail cells will be on a guided tour like mine.

Have a great day!