You know, it’s important to get outside – even for a little bit – each day.  The folks who ran the Eastern State Penitentiary thought so too.  Which is why for a time, cells came with a small outdoor space attached to each cell.

Yes, that’s right, this little piece of slab would be all yours while you were a prisoner here.

Now all you need is the BBQ.  And maybe some other human contact.

…in the prison.

Yes, there is a space that prisoners used for baseball during their “free” time.

Not much to say about this.  Then again, then this is your entire world, what would you say?

Even prisoners have served their country.  Eastern State Penitentiary is no different.  There is a plaque listing the prisoners who served in the military.  Notice anything unique about this plaque?

If you said there are no names on the plaque, then you are correct.  The prisoners who served are listed by their prisoner number.  Very meaningful, huh?

After you visit the Center room at the Eastern State Penitentiary, you start to head down each of the cell blocks.

It’s quite the experience actually.  You feel like you are stepping back in time, or into the twilight zone.

The twilight zone is about the best way to describe it.

One of the coolest places at the Eastern State Penitentiary is the center room.  From the center room a guard could see down all the main cell blocks. There were other cell blocks off of those main cell blocks.  In order to see down those cell blocks, guard had installed mirrors at strategic locations so they could literally see everything by standing in the center of the center room.

Here’s a feel for this.

It’s been said that Eastern State Penitentiary is a maintained ruins.  You can see it throughout your visit there.  It gives the visit an eerie feel to it.  Imagine going here on Halloween.

Maintained ruins.  It has a certain sound to it.  The prison is honest about what it is.  I wonder if we could be honest about some other places that we come across in our lives.

We had the opportunity to go inside a cell.  It’s quite the experience.

Each cell looks the same.  The table served as a work bench also.  Each inmate was expected to work doing something that they had a skill for.  Their time was not meant to be a time to just sit.

And best of all, here’s what the lighting looked like.

Not much light.  But still better than no light at all.

The thing that makes Eastern State Penitentiary so interesting – it’s a preserved wreck.  It’s in decline, but kept that way to show the reality.  Prison here wasn’t meant to be pretty and nice.  And now that deterioration has set in, we see the reality of that.

Looks like the setting for a horror film doesn’t it?  It gets better.

I’m back to posting about our trip to Philadelphia in January.  We were stopped by the Eastern State Penitentiary.  Let’s just say that it was incredible.

Once you pay for the audio self-guided tour, you get to wander freely about the grounds.  We spent about two hours doing just that and really enjoyed it.

First stop, a visual history of how the cell block changed over the years.

Can you imagine being in a cell like this?  And this being your door…

Of course, maybe that’s better than this option:

Inmates were brought in through the outer entrance.  These little doors were where they would receive food and be checked on.  Inmates were in a cell by themselves and had to remain silent.  Even the guards were said to wear socks over their shoes so that they would be silent while going down the hall.  The inmates had access to an outer cell where they could see the sky.  The point at the time was to give inmates the time to contemplate what it means to be good.  The reality is that many inmates went insane because of the lack of human contact.