San Francisco Tourist Attraction : Alcatraz Still Pulls In a Captive Audience

Paint is peeling from walls, bulldozed concrete buildings mar the view and barbed wire is rusting away, yet in just a few years shabby Alcatraz has become one of San Francisco’s hottest tourist attractions.

The 12-acre island in the San Francisco Bay--home to many of the nation’s most infamous criminals before the federal prison there was closed in 1963--draws up to 750,000 visitors a year.

That is roughly equal to the population of San Francisco itself.

Tourists wait for hours to board a ferry for the 10-minute ride to Alcatraz, which the National Park Service has maintained since 1973 as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Underworld’s Most Dangerous

This is where “Scarface” Al Capone, one of Chicago’s legendary mobsters; “Machine Gun” Kelly, a Tennessee bootlegger-turned-bank robber, and others considered the most dangerous of the underworld were imprisoned.

Capone was locked up for about five years before his release in 1939, a sick and dying man. Kelly spent the last 20 years of his life on Alcatraz, where he became a docile cobbler and furniture maker.

One of the most publicized inmates was Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, played by Burt Lancaster in a 1962 Hollywood film of the same name.

Stroud, a violent, antisocial man who spent 40 years in solitary confinement, arrived at Alcatraz after stabbing 16 people at a penitentiary in Washington and killing a guard with an ice pick at Leavenworth, Kan. Stroud by then was well-known for his detailed knowledge of birds and a classic study of bird diseases.

“He never had a bird at Alcatraz,” says Park Service Ranger Jean Dorsey, who spends much of an hourlong guided tour exploding myths about the island.

“He was nothing like Burt Lancaster,” she added, pointing to cell No. 42 on the third tier of Cellblock D where Stroud lived in segregation for six years.

The rich history of Alcatraz dates to the mid-1800s. The first lighthouse on the West Coast was built there in the 1850s. It became a military fortress in 1859 and remained under Army control for the next 74 years.

Temporary Lockup

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, dozens of military prisoners had been jailed there. When the great San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, brought down the city jail, the island became a temporary lockup for 200 prisoners from the mainland.

The cellblock, a forbidding concrete structure, was built atop “The Rock” to house 336 prisoners. It averaged 260 prisoners and was never filled to capacity.

Dorsey points out that it was an expensive prison, costing millions of dollars a year to operate. The island had no water supply, so water was delivered by barges. Generators had to be installed since there was no way to receive electricity from the mainland.

Not long before then-Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy ordered the prison closed in 1963, one congressman noted that it would be cheaper to put the inmates up at New York City’s elegant Waldorf-Astoria.

Today, a handful of cells are maintained with sparse furnishings of porcelain toilets, washbasins and steel cots as a reminder of life in what some called “Hellcatraz.”

Dorsey invites tourists to step inside pitch-black isolation cells, then shuts the doors behind them for 30 seconds. She does not lock them in. Not long after the tourist trips began, one group was accidentally locked inside for more than four hours until a locksmith arrived to unjam the lock.

Visitors now are warned not even to touch the heavy steel doors.

‘Smashed Fingers’

“We’ve had one ranger knocked out cold and some smashed fingers,” Dorsey said.

Next, she instructs tourists to stand back while she slams a dozen cell doors closed by pulling on a huge lever. The sound reverberates through the building. The slamming of the doors was recorded and used in the sound track of “Star Wars.”

Alcatraz has been used as a set for a number of movies, including “Escape from Alcatraz” in which Clint Eastwood portrayed a prisoner who participated in a real 1962 escape attempt.

Authorities never learned whether three inmates who disappeared after that incident--bank robber Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin--survived the treacherous journey through bone-chilling water and strong tides to the mainland.

Pieces of rafts that the escapees had fashioned with raincoats stolen from a prison factory were found floating in the Bay.

“Do you think they made it?” asks Dorsey. She notes that the record books report no successful escapes from Alcatraz.

“They would only be in their 60s today. Do you think they might be living in your neighborhood?”