Fear and freedom on Alcatraz Island: sleeping in the Birdman's cell and Ai Weiwei's defiance

The face of Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, is compelling, glaring at tourists from his mugshot on the wall of the prison in which he spent 17 years. His cruel eyes are utterly without remorse for his multiple murders. Not the sort of person one would wish to share a 9ft by 5ft cell with, yet one dark October night, I slept on the bed he called his own for six years, looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge through the bars and all too conscious of his malevolent spirit.

Alcatraz: the most infamous prison in the world

The Birdman

In the Birdman's cell

I hasten to assure readers that I was not on Alcatraz because of any crime, but as part of a lucky, or mad, group belonging to FOGG, Friends of the Golden Gate. A young-professionals organisation raising money for and awareness of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, FOGG runs events throughout the year, from the FOGG Fest barbecue on Crissy Field in June to birdwatching hikes and explorations of the Parks that cover 80,000 acres of San Francisco and Marin counties. Only non-profit groups are allowed to sleep on Alcatraz, usually Scouts, and fewer than 600 people do so each year. A very lucky lottery draw meant that FOGG, led by the indomitable Elissa Kerrigan, joined the small list of groups able to spend a night on the most infamous island in the world.

Busted: Robert and Mark of FOGG, suitably attired

Damn it, they got me! 

The brave - or bonkers - souls of FOGG

We slept in D-Block, site of the solitary confinement cells known as the Hole and home to some of the most evil people ever imprisoned. Baby-faced gangster Al Capone, Alvin Creepy Karpis, who crept everywhere on his toes, and, of course, the Birdman, all inhabited this block. Climbing the stairs to the top level, I rushed to claim cell No 42, because it is the number of my London flat and, as aficionados of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will know, the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Unfortunately, our encyclopedic guide, ranger Wendy Solis, later revealed that this top-corner cell was in fact home to Stroud himself. Getting a good night's sleep instantly became even less likely.

The steel door to D Block, home to the worst men of all

No 42 is the top right. The cells on the lower level are the

solitary confinement cells, or Hole, where men were left for 

hours or even days in total darkness

Looking along the top row of D Block 

If you want to known anything, anything, about Alcatraz,

just ask ranger Wendy Solis

The film Birdman of Alcatraz, starring Burt Lancaster, is a complete fiction - Stroud never had birds on the island and was far from the mild-mannered individual Lancaster portrays. The name comes from his time in Leavenworth jail, Kansas, where he raised some 300 canaries in his cell. He was a skilled conman who duped guards and birdwatching society into thinking he was reformed, but when denied a visit from his brother he killed a guard in the dining hall and was sent to Alcatraz as punishment. Once on the island, he frequently stirred up the other prisoners, once inciting them all to set fire to their mattresses as he sat demurely in his undamaged room. Such actions led him to be confined in a psychiatric cell in the hospital wing, where contact with prisoners was minimal. He lived there for 11 years.

The Birdman's cell, and now mine

Stroud's cell in the prison hospital today

There are legends galore on this lump of rock, three miles from the Golden Gate and just a mile and a half from San Francisco itself. After we had slung our sleeping bags into our cells, we followed Wendy along the western edge of the island as the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge, creating one of the most beautiful views in the world. That prisoners could see the bridge and hear festivities on the mainland made their incarceration all the harder. Looking over the old incinerator site, where the first escape attempt was made by Joseph 'Dutch' Bowers, sentenced for 25 years for mail robbery, it was easy to imagine the mental anguish that led him to climb the fence in broad daylight and in full view of four officers. The belief is that it was not an escape attempt at all, but suicide by guard. One man, John Paul Scott, did succeed in getting off the island and was swept to Fort Point on the southern side of the Golden Gate. His clothes ripped off by the force of the waves, he was rescued by some fishermen, who kindly called the police for help. The police, alerted to an escape, quickly tumbled to the man's identity and Scott was back in his cell by nightfall. One dreads to imagine his state of mind.

One of the most beautiful places in the world:

ever out of reach of the inmates of Alcatraz

Evening light on the prison walls

So near and yet so far: the site of the death of Joseph Bowers

As the sun disappeared, we climbed a steep staircase to the exercise yard. Prisoners could play baseball and enjoy the view from the steps, but anyone making a concerted effort to keep fit was swiftly dissuaded. The food was plentiful and calorific, but not conducive to fitness - no one wanted a prisoner strong enough to overpower a guard. Another precaution could be glimpsed on the way back inside, in the form of a shadow on the floor where the metal detector stood. There was a slight flaw in this policy in that it didn't reach the prisoners' heads, and they were allowed to wear hats, under which implements were easily hidden. And these men were resourceful - a sharpened chicken bone made as good a weapon as any. Indeed, in the only successful escape attempt, told in the film Escape from Alcatraz, a spoon was the main tool in a well-planned exodus that saw three men manufacture fake heads from papier mâché and real hair, chip holes with the spoons into a maintenance corridor behind their cells and leave the island with raft and lifejackets made from raincoats. They were never found, and the general presumption is that they drowned, but Wendy told us of a postcard sent to the prison warden a few weeks after their escape and apparently signed by all three - suggestive, methinks. Their surviving families were invited to Alcatraz in 2012 to mark the 50th anniversary of the escape, and despite numerous innocently phrased questions, revealed nothing. As the men are still on the Wanted list, and could still be alive, it is little wonder that their families are staying schtum.

Stairway to heaven - or not

The prison exercise yard on a clear evening. Lines on the concrete

indicated where groups drew up for duties, laundry, glove-making and so on

The cells from which Frank Morris (played by Clint Eastwood) and the 

Anglin brothers escaped in 1962. Fake heads gave the guards quite 

a turn when they tumbled out of empty beds at roll call

On a peaceful morning, it seems eminently possible that

the three escapees made it to Angel Island and thence to the mainland;

even, perhaps, to South America

The tale of their escape is one of the many stories told by former guards and inmates on the Alcatraz audio tour. I'm not usually keen on zombie-inducing headphones, not least because, being deaf, I can seldom hear them clearly, but the Alcatraz tour is an exception. It is brilliantly composed, clear and full of absorbing stories, guiding one's steps around the prison as inhabitants give their perspective on what it was like to sleep in a cell, patrol at night or the fall-out from the Battle of Alcatraz in which three prisoners and two guards lost their lives. Guard Frank Miller, fatally injured yet devoted to duty to the end, scratched the names of the perpetrators on the wall and circled the names of the ringleaders. Shot holes on the walls and marks from grenades on the floor are a potent contrast with the cells filled with artwork and musical instruments owned by more peaceful inmates.

Cells decorated with paintings and enlivened with games: 

as much of a home as an Alcatraz cell could be 

Indeed, although Alcatraz was notorious for housing the nation's most dangerous men - the slogan ran "if you break the rules, you go to prison. If you break the prison rules, you go to Alcatraz" - some prisoners disproved the remark made by Frank Weatherman, the last man to leave when the prison closed in 1963: 'This Rock ain't good for nobody.' Wendy told us of an inmate, doing time for burglary, who worked on the hospital and was eventually entrusted with the operation of the X-ray machine. Leaving as a qualified radiographer, he worked on the mainland in a civilian hospital, married a nurse and never committed a crime again. Another man found God and was ordained as a priest within the prison walls, marrying a church-going prison-visitor. Sadly, he had an affair after his release and they got divorced, but one can at least understand the temptation when being presented with a cornucopia of women after the all-male penitentiary. 

The giant cooking pots in the kitchens

But as so often in life, it ain't the good men who create the legends. When you prowl along Broadway or Michigan Avenue by night or listen to the mechanical clang of the grills being slammed shut, step into a solitary confinement cell or look up at the tear-gas canisters on the ceiling of the mess hall (they were never used), it is the malevolence of the place that consumes you. Alone on the island, when all the day trippers had left, we finished our burgers (perfectly cooked by orange-clad Robert and Mark) and set off on a tour of the parts of Alcatraz the tourists don't get to see. Lit only by the occasional golden-hued security light or our torches, the shadows seemed full of the ghosts of the departed inhabitants, military and political prisoners, murderers and rapists. We passed through a tunnel to the old laundry room, where dark rooms are glimpsed through broken glass panes. We climbed to the southern gun gallery, where guards patrolled with loaded weapons, looking down on the ranks of barred cells, and ventured to the old chapel, red paint scrawled on the walls during the Indian occupation of 1970 appearing straight out of a horror movie. The panelling in the neighbouring officers' mess was stripped for firewood during the occupation, giving the room a forlorn look very different from its convivial atmosphere when off-duty guards played pool on the table that was exactly the same size as a cell, 9ft by 5ft. We even ventured down the steep steps into the morgue, where the autopsy table stood, deep runnels leading to a hole in the centre for drainage. It was never used for autopsies and the cold-storage drawers stayed empty, but the chill is unmistakable. Squeezing past the back-up generators, the only permanent occupants, we padded along a passage to what was once a powder magazine during the island's time as a military fort. Once in, we turned off our flashlights and the dark descended, disorientating and oppressive, just as it did upon inmates of the similar caverns below D-block, conscientious objectors and political prisoners condemned to blackness.  

 

Fully mechanical, the cell doors were opened by a system of levers that 

allowed guards to select all, a few or just one door at a time. 

Red paint down the edge of the door showed at a glance from the end 

of each row which doors were open. The system has been known to stick: 

after an overnight guest got trapped accidentally, visitors are no longer locked in!

Taking a sight on the cells of Broadway from the southern gun gallery

Graffiti left by the Native American occupiers of 1970. 

Red is their colour of power, but it looks awfully like something

more sinister when viewed at midnight on Alcatraz

The pristine pool table in the plundered guard room: 

eerily, exactly the same size as a cell

Broadway, the main row of cells, by night. See any ghosts?

In the hospital (open to visitors on the sunset tours), peeling paint and unshaded lightbulbs throw intense shadows. The operating table is stark and bare in the centre of the first room, a glass case full of basic supplies evoking thoughts of chloroform and catgut, far from our 21st-century medical-drama sensibilities. Two tiny cells, lined entirely with polished ceramic tiles and isolated by tiled passages from the main corridor, were spotless, cleaned of the hideous fluids insane inmates would smear in their rages, glass bricks at the rear giving onto a room where a psychiatrist would watch in safety. Al Capone, suffering from dementia in his final years, lived here in a large open-fronted cage and the Birdman leered from his long cell that served as exercise yard and bedroom at once. The ceiling in the main room is even speckled with blood - but it's fake blood, from when it served as the principal location for the film The Rock, in which Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage infiltrate the island via an astonishing (and fictional) maze of apparent mining machinery to stop Ed Harris blowing up San Francisco. Wendy pointed out the bath that Connery hid in and the tiles where Harris slumped in his death throes. In true Hollywood fashion, the real showers, where Al Capone was once stabbed in the back in flagrante with a pair of scissors, were deemed too tame and replaced by a Gothic, green-hued maze, and the actual tunnels rejected in favour of purpose-built sets in Hollywood. But watching The Rock again the night afterwards, safe in a warm room with a view of the island, one had to concede they did a cracking job. 

A far cry from ER

See the mottled ceiling? That's blood, Hollywood style. The door at the end

was replaced with a round barred window in the film

The bath where Sean Connery hid

The real showers, were Capone was once stabbed with a pair

of scissors, now the collection point for the audio tour

Apparently, this tunnel wasn't considered 'authentic' enough...

Often forgotten, partly because their homes were lost to fire during the Indian occupation, are the families of wardens and officers who lived on the island and enjoyed a remarkably idyllic life: gardening, playing on the rocky shore and taking the boat to school on the mainland every day. Under the faint light of a new moon, we explored the gardens on the east side, neatly maintained by volunteers with pretty box hedges and flowers. The steep steps down seemed unnecessarily small and narrow, until Wendy explained that they were built thus to facilitate the passage of Warden Edwin Swope's dog, a golden retriever named Mr Patrick. Dogs and cats were not allowed on the island, but what's the point in being in charge if you can't break your own rules? The army was the first to create gardens on Alcatraz, ferrying soil onto the barren rock as early as 1865, and subsequent occupants, including prisoners, created hillside terraces and rose gardens. Counterfeiter Elliott Michener worked for nine years to create a horticultural paradise on the western side - the fig tree he planted is still there - having been given special dispensation to order seeds and build a greenhouse after he returned a lost key to a guard. All was abandoned with the prison in 1963, but has been restored by the National Park Service, Garden Conservancy and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Now, the Alcatraz Historic Gardens Project continues to maintain a surprisingly beautiful element of the Rock.

Some of the gardens on the eastern side of the island, where the houses 

of Officers' Row used to stand during the military years. 

Wives of prison officers condemned them as too noisy and close to the prison walls, 

so they were demolished to make way for gardens

Part of Elliott Michener's garden, with San Francisco beyond

The fig tree Michener planted, still flourishing today

Yet despite the peace and beauty that can be found in this outpost of the national parks, one can never forget that this place is famous for brutality and incarceration, for keeping men confined behind bars. The inmates of Alcatraz were, for the most part, deserving of such treatment, but many were prisoners of conscience and there still are too many in this world locked up for nothing more than speaking out against unjust regimes. Now, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, despite being trapped in China, his passport confiscated by the authorities, has created seven installations for the island that explore the timeless theme of freedom of expression, on view until April 26th, 2015. A video showing their construction in his Beijing studio features an interview with the artist when he speaks of his 'duty' to give a voice to the oppressed, and I can think of few more powerful ways to do this than through his sound, mixed-media and sculpture installations within the walls of the most famous prison of all.

Ai Weiwei, photographed in Beijing in June 2014

By Jan Stürmann, courtesy FOR-SITE Foundation

In A Block, the less secure rows of cells that were principally used to house conscientious objectors during the First World War, single three-legged stools stand in the centre of each cell. From hidden speakers come the voices and music of people imprisoned for their creative expression or which they wrote while imprisoned. To the tune of Oh My Darling Clementine is What a System (What a Crime) by the Robben Island Singers of South Africa, the sweet strains of Pavel Haas's Study for String Orchestra written in Terezin concentration camp seep through the walls and the achingly beautiful words of the songs penetrate deep into one's consciousness. 

                My guitar is not for the rich,

                no, nothing like that.

                My song is of the ladder

                we are building to reach the stars

                For a song has meaning

                when it beats in the veins

                of a man who will die singing,

                truthfully singing his songs.

                         Extract from 'Manifesto' by Victor Jara, a Chilean singer, songwriter and theatre director, imprisoned, tortured and killed after the Chilean military coup of 1973

                A homesick sparrow

                Perches on the heart's window.

                With longing eyes, 

                it cranes out to glance at the houses

                At the distant skies

                Waiting for a cheerful morning     

                        Extract from 'A Homesick Sparrow' by Mahjoub Sharif, Sudan's 'poet of the people' , imprisoned many times from 1971. He wrote this in prison in 1999     

The chanting of Buddhist monks and Hopi Indians (the first prisoners of conscience on the Rock) echo off the tiled walls of the psychiatric observation cells, evoking the importance of music as an escape or a comfort. Also in the hospital, bursting from lavatory bowls and sinks and bathtubs, are white ceramic flowers in Blossom, a reminder of the 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign that flourished during a brief period of permitted freedom of expression in China, a period that was swiftly ended by a government crackdown.

The shadows of A Block by night

 

Stay Tuned to the music of the oppressed

Listening to Illumination in the prison hospital

By Alison Taggart-Barone, Parks Conservancy

Part of Blossom in the prison hospital

By Jan Stürmann, courtesy FOR-SITE Foundation

In the dining hall, racks of postcards addressed to people still behind bars all over the world stand beside polished tables bearing pens and folders telling the stories behind the recipients. Visitors can write their own messages and the cards will be sent winging their way to prisons around the globe, a tiny indication that they are not forgotten. It put our own adventure, paying to spend a spooky night on Alcatraz, into trite, almost insulting perspective.

Yours Truly in the Alcatraz dining hall

By Jan Stürmann, courtesy FOR-SITE Foundation

When all was silent on the island but for the members of FOGG, we lit our torches and made our way to the New Industries Building, where inmates would work making gloves or cargo nets, doing laundry or manufacturing brushes. Long and dusty, with broken glass panes and rusting bars, it hulks down on the north-eastern shore like a relic of the Industrial Revolution. We made our way along the gun gallery in the footsteps of the prison guards, looking down through grimy glass to where Ai Weiwei's Refraction hung, silvery panels strung together in a giant wing that would never fly. Our torchbeams glinted off its metallic curves, the panels, once part of Tibetan solar cookers, evoking an earth-bound plough and the sweeping wing of a great bird at once. Huge but impotent, streamlined but confined, shadowed where it should be bathed in sunlight, it spoke of trammeled power, a great being ensnared in this temple to imprisonment.

Refraction, seen through the bars of the gun gallery

By Ryan Curran White, courtesy Parks Conservancy

Refraction, seen by daylight in the New Industries Building

By Jan Stürmann, courtesy FOR-SITE Foundation

Stepping down to the main entrance, we flung wide the doors to be greeted by a brilliantly coloured dragon, its vivid colours a stark and wonderful contrast with the grey gloom all around. With Wind is a traditional Chinese dragon kite, a series of kites strung together. Handmade by Chinese artisans working with Ai Weiwei's studio, it references 30 countries with records of restricting civil liberties. Like With Wind, its position in this low-ceilinged building, winding around pillars, speaks of liberty destroyed, a beautiful creature unable to fly.

Beauty confined, a dragon slain

With Wind from tail to head, winding through its personal prison

Beyond is the last of the installations: Trace. Stretching away across the floor of the workshop are portraits upon portraits of men, women and children imprisoned or exiled for their beliefs. 175 faces fashioned in Lego, an innocent material for innocent people wronged by their countries. Designed by Ai Weiwei and reassembled by a team of volunteers in San Francisco, the expanse of floor is testament to the defiance of a great artist and the people who helped him, a collaboration in the best tradition of humanity in total contrast to the dictatorial machinations that make such an exhibition as this so powerful and, sadly, so necessary.

Faces upon faces in Trace

Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the child once destined to be the Dalai Lama,

missing since 1995

Sobered by @Large, we continued our explorations down onto the old military parade ground on the southern tip of the island. Above us, resplendent in the orange light of the San Francisco Giants, our World Series winning baseball team, was the lighthouse that protects the myriad shipping of the Bay from inadvertently landing on the Rock. There was a real thrill in the air, a sense of being somewhere special, somewhere imbued with legend, on this still starry night in the autumn of 2014. As I lay in cell no 42, surprisingly warm yet unwilling to expose any part of my body outside the sleeping bag for fear of the touch of ghostly fingers, I could see lights flickering on the Golden Gate Bridge and reflected that it wasn't a bad view for jail. Yet the bars were oppressive, and I was deeply thankful that I would be leaving on the morrow. Outside, the new Moon shone as a promise of new beginnings, of the endless cycle of a world where good as yet outnumbers evil. That a lump of granite could have been home to bad men, yet now be a place for holidaying tourists and a triumphant exhibition that represents the indomitable human spirit is surely a reason for hope. We may struggle sometimes under the weight of bad news and cruel regimes, but while there are still good men who do something, not nothing (to paraphrase Edmund Burke), evil will not prevail.

Alcatraz Island and San Francisco: truly the 

land of the free and the home of the brave