We never failed to glance out over the choppy gray-blue waters when crossing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. We crossed that bridge often in the 1950s and early-60s. The distant atoll, the model-train buildings. The place they sent Al Capone. Alcatraz was where the evildoers were, an icon symbolizing why crime doesn’t pay.
President Trump wants to bring it back. It’s a cinematic notion, worth the expenditure to his law-and-order base. For the millions who voted for him on blind faith or to avoid perceived disaster, it’s another quirky “Really?” For Democrats, the call to reopen the old federal prison is a bait-trap designed to elicit another round of the histrionic hysteria that’s destroying them.
On sunny days, Alcatraz seemed out of nowhere, a mirage of eucalyptus and dirt. Looking north from Yerba Buena Island—halfway point between Oakland and “The City”—you could almost imagine the imprisoned having whatever passed for a good day. On foggy days, you felt the hopelessness of the incarcerated, but never empathy: too bad for them, the bastards.
The release of The Birdman of Alcatraz in 1962 (one year before the penitentiary was shut down for good,) captured our attention. Burt Lancaster’s portrayal of convicted murderer Robert Stroud was undoubtedly the first time we’d seen a malefactor depicted as a human being with the potential to be redeemed. Earlier, the shark-shredded prison garb of some bold escapees fit the narrative better, front page news in the San Francisco Chronicle. Coverage that conceptually sealed the fate of souls sentenced, out there.
A visit in 1985 marked the transformation of the prison to tourist attraction. I took the launch out with 20 other sightseers. Grew silent as the engines cut and the multi-story cell block and tinker-toy water tower loomed. From the dock, attention spans drifted, from a gorgeous SF skyline, to Oakland’s less magnificent hub, to the reality which greeted each bad person whose transgressions ended them here. Inside, the stink of mold and mildew overcame the nostrils. Walking past toilets and sinks, salt-air rusted bars, our footsteps echoing off walls of efflorescing concrete.
“Would anyone like to enter the solitary confinement chamber?” asks the guide, wherein visitors can experience the total darkness that falls when the lights go out. About a quarter of the visitors agreed, and came out laughing, shaking their heads, a subsumed grasp of psychological panic.
The administrative offices, wood-paneled, almost nice, archaic with typewriters, file cabinets, filtered sunlight. A fresh headwind from the Golden Gate. Out of there. A quiet launch ride back to Fisherman’s Wharf.
How many millions will it take to restore this infamous place. Is anything but the gutted shells of the structures salvageable? Do new bars pencil out in terms of American-made steel? How much to bring technological utility to those mellowed offices which kept track with paper and elbow grease of those consigned to live and often die here?
Will the flag of terminal confinement fly again over San Francisco’s rock?