Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1830s

For Nighthawk’s Wing, the second Gideon Stoltz mystery, I created a character who has just been released from Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia after serving a three-year sentence for killing her abusive husband. Rebecca Kreidler’s story is woven into the novel through a series of flashbacks. 

When Eastern State opened in 1829, it was considered an architectural marvel and an exemplar of humane prison reform. It sat on a hill in farmland a mile and a half outside the city of Brotherly Love. Today it’s a spooky rambling ruin fronting on Fairmount Avenue six blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and half a mile north of Interstate 676. 

Several years ago I visited the prison and took a tour. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to live in one of the cells, enduring solitary confinement for years on end, making shoes or weaving cloth by day, reading the Bible by candlelight at night, forbidden to receive letters, have visitors, or talk to other prisoners or even the guards. 

Eastern state penitentiary, wikimedia commons

Eastern State is shaped like a starburst or an asterisk, with seven linear cell blocks extending out from a central surveillance rotunda. From the outside, its gray stone walls, guard towers, and slit windows give it the menacing look of a medieval fortress or a castle. Inside, the long echoing corridors have barrel-vaulted ceilings and circular skylights. On each side lie the cells.

In 1832, when Rebecca Kreidler was sent there, each inmate lived in a private 8-by-12-foot cell. The space was lit by a skylight called “the eye of God.” The cell had a feeding slot on the corridor end and, at the other end, a locked iron door leading to an outdoor pen with ten-foot walls, where prisoners could exercise twice a day. At a time when the White House, occupied by President Andrew Jackson, had no running water and got its heat from coal-burning stoves, Eastern State boasted central heating, running water, and toilets in the prisoners’ cells that flushed once a day, all at the same time throughout the building. 

It was a wholly new kind of prison. The guards didn’t pummel or flog or cane. Convicts weren’t thrown together into holding pens, where pickpockets and murderers, horse thieves and forgers, sorted out their disputes behind locked doors. Eastern State was founded on the rational humanistic principles of the Enlightenment. Its Quaker-inspired system of isolating prisoners from one another was supposed to let them ponder and reject their past wicked behavior and become truly penitent. Hence the term penitentiary. 

When it was built, Eastern State was the most expensive public structure in the United States. It covered twelve acres. Its sound-deadening walls were eighteen inches thick. Tourists and reformers flocked to see this architectural and social wonder.

Alexis de Tocqueville (best known for his Democracy in America) visited in 1831 and reported to the French government: “Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope; makes him industrious by the burden of idleness?”

During the century after Eastern State opened, more than 300 prisons based on its plan were built in South America, Europe, Russia, Japan, and throughout the British Empire. 

Not everyone was favorably impressed. Charles Dickens recounted an 1842 visit in his travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation: “In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but  . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” 

As the years went by, the prison would relax its policy of strict isolation. It closed in 1971 and sat vacant for decades. It’s now owned by a nonprofit organization and is open to the public as a historic site. (Take a virtual tour at www.easternstate.org.)

In a New Yorker article entitled “Hellhole,” Atul Gawande notes that about a third of present-day prisoners held in solitary confinement become acutely psychotic and experience hallucinations: in Charles Dickens’s words, the “ghastly signs and tokens” of enforced solitude. 

In Nighthawk’s Wing, Rebecca Kreidler’s token is a nighthawk, a silent presence that visits her in her cell. The nighthawk comes with her when she’s released from the penitentiary and makes her way west to Gideon Stoltz’s Colerain County.