IV. Fabric Summary 282 Copyrighted Material
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Eastern State Penitentiary HSR: IV. Fabric Summary 282 IV. FABRIC SUMMARY: CONSTRUCTION, ALTERATIONS, AND USES OF SPACE (for documentation, see Appendices A and B, by date, and C, by location) Jeffrey A. Cohen § A. Front Building (figs. C3.1 - C3.19) Work began in the 1823 building season, following the commencement of the perimeter walls and preceding that of the cellblocks. In August 1824 all the active stonecutters were employed cutting stones for the front building, though others were idled by a shortage of stone. Twenty-foot walls to the north were added in the 1826 season bounding the warden's yard and the keepers' yard. Construction of the center, the first three wings, the front building and the perimeter walls were largely complete when the building commissioners turned the building over to the Board of Inspectors in July 1829. The half of the building east of the gateway held the residential apartments of the warden. The west side initially had the kitchen, bakery, and other service functions in the basement, apartments for the keepers and a corner meeting room for the inspectors on the main floor, and infirmary rooms on the upper story. The latter were used at first, but in September 1831 the physician criticized their distant location and lack of effective separation, preferring that certain cells in each block be set aside for the sick. By the time Demetz and Blouet visited, about 1836, ill prisoners were separated rather than being placed in a common infirmary, and plans were afoot for a group of cells for the sick, with doors left ajar like others. And the bakery had been relocated also. The axial route was controlled by two pairs of gates in sequence, never opened simultaneously. The adjoining gatekeeper’s room was west of the gateway, at least in 1872. The story over the gate at center held the apothecary's office, and the front tower was meant to hold a clock and an alarm bell. By 1872 the western apartments accommodated the resident physician, the clerk's office, and by the early 1890s the matron. The inspectors' room had by then been relocated to the corner room on the main floor in the warden's half of the structure. By 1837 (fig. A6) both yards had privies in their far corners, that in the warden's yard on a terrace. At the northeast corner of the "domestics' garden," on the west, was a small three-chamber building for receiving new prisoners, bathing them, and storing their possessions. A stable and coachhouse extended westward outside the wall of this yard. A well-fenestrated dye workshop had been appended outside the east wall of the warden's yard. It was probably built shortly after a March 1831 notice stating the a new dye house was needed where 3 or 4 inmates might work while separated. This was apparently not ready in August 1831, at which point dyeing was relocated from a Copyrighted Material Eastern State Penitentiary HSR: IV. Fabric Summary 283 passage to "the old house." This or another dye shop near the front was mentioned in an 1861 notice of an escape using yarn from the dye shop. In 1872 a new room had just been devised for receiving prisoners, replacing the use of the gatekeeper's room (probably in the western basement) for that purpose. Here the prisoner was officially received, examined, assigned a number, bathed, and clothed. In 1905 the receiving structure in the west yard was extended with rooms for fingerprinting and photography in connection with the adoption of the Bertillon identification system. A kennel building for the patrolling Great Danes was built immediately east of the eastern corner apartment in 1905, replacing an earlier structure elsewhere. A large number of inmates in various trades were employed in renovations to the warden's quarters, completed in 1900. A sixty-foot flagpole was erected on the central tower in late June 1900. Warden McKenty's daughter, who resided there from 1906-25, recalled the arrangement: on the lower floor there was a very large kitchen, a dining room, a den, and a larger dining room for Board of Directors. Upstairs was a hallway, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and very large sitting room. The third floor had two bedrooms and large rm. Some major changes took place in 1924-25, most intended to improve security. Administrative offices and the meeting room for the board, now trustees rather than inspectors, were removed from their decades-long location between cellblocks nine and one. These included offices for the warden, a secretary, deputy warden, parole officer, head bookkeeper, and assistants and clerks. The switchboard was moved to the eastern basement. The warden's residence, in this case that of Warden Herbert E. Smith, was switched to the west side's main floor, with the deputy warden on the story above. Visiting, formerly accommodated in designated cells in each cellblock, was consolidated into a basement room in the administration building that allowed ten prisoners at a time to be visited at wire windows. A third set of gates, of iron, was erected between the inner and outer gate. In early 1937, $25,000 was set aside for construction of a new electrical front gate and a new structure to house it, replacing the old wooden, studded door. Permission was given to use material from the emergency hospital, to be demolished. The work was complete by late 1938. In the 1930s, the warden was described as having a "tower" office, probably that in the western corner of the front building; the trustees appear to have returned from there to the office between cellblocks nine and one, according to a 1936 WPA plan. The eastern yard served as an exercise yard, possibly for those held in administrative segregation (in cellblock one), as was the case in 1954, as recalled by Warden Brierly. After the Bertillon offices were moved into the new building completed between blocks 8 and 9 in 1941, the old Bertillon building in the west yard was reassigned as the "utility building." The prison began to purchase electricity from Philadelphia Electric Co. in 1952, allowing it to abandon the power house located between blocks 3 and 4; the old Copyrighted Material Eastern State Penitentiary HSR: IV. Fabric Summary 284 Bertillon building was refurbished as a new substation A new building was added here along the western yard wall in 1956, this to accommodate the officers' mess, adjoining a kitchen in the basement of the front block. And a half-sunken emergency generator room was added after 1964. Much of the tall eastern boundary wall of this western yard was opened or reduced in the mid-1950s, probably in concert with these changes. Some renovation work was performed on the administrative offices in 1952. A guard during the 1950s and 1960s mentioned a control room in the front building, with buttons for operating the gates; it was so short he had to lie down in there. Drawings of the new visiting room in the eastern yard, basement level, by Keast & Hemphill, Architects, are dated Jan. 1962. The datestone suggests construction took place in 1964. The drawings identified the adjoining rooms in the old fabric as, from the west, the arsenal, two vaulted waiting rooms for the public, and then the bigger, vaulted corner room as the guards' day room. At the ends of the new visiting area were separate spaces for attorney visiting and secure visiting. To the north were spaces identified as EDCC (Eastern Diagnostic and Classification Center) transfer and receiving. Copyrighted Material Eastern State Penitentiary HSR: IV. Fabric Summary 285 § B. Cellblock One (figs. D3.1 - D3.21) The foundations for cellblocks one, two, and three were begun in the 1823 season, and construction of the first of these was largely completed during the 1825 season. Each cellblock was to have 38 cells. Construction of the center, the first three wings, the front building and the perimeter walls was largely complete when the building commissioners turned the building over to the Board of Inspectors in July 1829. Block one received its first prisoner in late October. But by December the planned hot-air furnaces had not yet been built, and the warden instead had six small coal stoves set up in the cells being used. Work was hastened on the furnaces, as this makeshift was found "troublesome, expensive, and dirty." In early 1832 the penitentiary's physician reported that there was inadequate heat in some cells, failing to reach 60 degrees; until it was improved, he proposed, stoves should be permitted in such cells. A year later the inspectors' building committee announced that the better ventilated skylights installed in blocks 4, 5, and 6 had now also been adopted in the three original blocks, with beneficial results. (Some cells, such as 1-16, indeed have such rectangular skylight, but others do not. Several of the cells here, such as 1-12, have their original dead-eyes, less amenable to propping open, but also have ventilating funnels in the wall to their yard.) By 1837 there was a cluster of frame structures at its southeastern end, that on axis housing the furnace heating the block, the other structures described by Demetz and Blouet as "hangars." They also described the first three blocks as having been paved in brick, in contrast to the two-story blocks, paved in silver-gray stone slabs. These older blocks were apparently repaved in stone slabs sometime in the mid-19th century. A distinctive detail of cellblock one was Haviland’s squaring of the exposed corner of the innermost yard on the south (see figs.