‘Tunnel’ Play Recaptures Jail Escape : Penitentiary: ‘Brain’ and his friends had no chance. Most were quickly recaptured; one knocked on the prison door a week later and asked to be let in, saying he was hungry.

He could have made it, if he had gone alone, in the middle of the night, past the rats and the underground river, up to the sky. He would have been home free.

But Clarence Klinedinst, a small-time robber with big dreams of freedom, waited until daylight to break out of the Eastern State Penitentiary, a hulking stone fortress founded by people who believed that man will be good if left alone.

Eleven other inmates followed him down the 100-foot-long hole right after breakfast on April 3, 1945. Ice truck driver Daniel Flowers, parked on busy Fairmount Avenue, was amazed to see 12 prisoners wriggling out of the ground covered with mud.

“They popped out like so many brown rats,” he said. “I couldn’t count them, they came so fast.”

In broad daylight, Klinedinst and his friends had no chance. Most were recaptured that day; one knocked on the prison door a week later and asked to be let in, saying he was hungry. Two others lasted eight weeks.

But the story of this not-so-great escape has lived on.

Today the 165-year-old prison stands alone on 1 1/2 city blocks, its 30-foot-high stone walls keeping the brightly lit restaurants and garbage-littered parking lots of the present outside.

This spring, a play produced inside retold the story of Klinedinst’s botched breakout.

Klinedinst, a mason before he was a petty thief, was left alone much of the time he spent at Eastern in the 1940s. Instead of using his solitude to repent, he engineered the most daring breakout in the prison’s history, digging a tunnel from a hole in the corner of his cell.

He spent more than a year burrowing into the dark, cold earth, using tools from his job as the prison plasterer to tunnel through stone, gravel, rats and ground water before he dug under the thick outside wall to freedom.

Many of the men who followed Klinedinst had nothing to lose by trying--they were lifers. But Klinedinst was up for parole in a year. And all he got for a year of digging was two hours of freedom and another three to six years on a 15-year sentence.

“I can’t understand why he did it,” said William Rayhill, an actor who plays Klinedinst in “Tunnel,” the play dramatizing the breakout.

“Tunnel” used the abandoned prison’s cellblocks, its cold, stale air and its stone floors as a set.

Minty-green paint (prison officials thought it was a soothing color) peels off like sheets of paper. Water drips through a decaying plaster ceiling onto rusty metal bed frames. Trees grow through cellblocks, weeds and debris are everywhere and a horde of cats has the run of the place.

Preservationists have opened the prison for tours, hoping to spark interest its history.

“It is, in our view, one of the most important buildings in the United States. It is also one of the most endangered,” said Bill Bolger, a National Park Service director.

Bolger is on a task force dedicated to keeping the prison standing and out of developers’ hands. In recent years Eastern has survived attempts to turn it into a shopping mall and an apartment complex.

Eastern State was a model for prison reform when it took its first prisoner in 1829, founded by Quakers who believed criminals needed to be anonymous and alone to change for the better.

The penitentiary’s architectural style--seven cellblocks radiating from a central rotunda--and its innovative penal philosophy inspired hundreds of replicas from Beijing to Paris.

“Certainly more people have heard of the Bastille, the Tower of London, Alcatraz and probably even Sing Sing,” said Norman Johnston, a Beaver College professor who has written a book about Eastern. “But in terms of influencing other places, nothing compares to the Philadelphia prison.”

Eastern was a 19th Century tourist attraction. John Quincy Adams visited; so did Alexis de Tocqueville. When Charles Dickens visited America, he wanted to see only two sites: Niagara Falls and Eastern State Penitentiary.

Eastern inmates came into jail with sacks over their heads, so they could see no one and no one could see them to judge them later for their mistakes. They were ushered into 12-by-8-foot cells, dark temples of contemplation complete with toilets, central heat and individual exercise yards.

Prisoners never left their cells and, theoretically, didn’t see or speak to a soul until their sentences ended.

The isolation system was abandoned in the 1860s, after authorities realized solitude drove many prisoners crazy.

Over the years, its famous inmates included mobster Al Capone and bank robber Willie Sutton, who took credit for the 1945 escape in an autobiography.

But Randall Wise, who wrote and co-directed “Tunnel,” wanted to credit the right man--Klinedinst--with the breakout.

Klinedinst had very little help, Wise said. Of the 12 inmates who crawled to freedom, only five knew of the break beforehand, said Wise.

Besides Flowers, a milkman and two police officers witnessed the breakout. Klinedinst was captured in two hours, brought back to the pen by police who recognized his stutter.

Sutton was arrested immediately. Klinedinst’s cellmate, William Russell, was brought back on a stretcher, shot seven times by police. James Van Sant, nicknamed “Botchie” for all the crimes he fumbled, and Freddie Tenuto, a mob hit man, took the milk truck and were on the lam for eight weeks before they were arrested in New York City.

The tunnel was filled with concrete, ash and dirt. Klinedinst was transferred to the city’s Holmesburg Prison, tried to escape again over the wall, again with Sutton, and again was recaptured in a few hours.

He remained in prison for most of the rest of his life; he was released from Eastern State in 1970, and died months later.

That same year, the penitentiary closed.