Survey Says

The Prison Babes, c. 1989: Whitney Morrill, Beth Adams, Mary Alice Tucker, Claire Donato, Tamarah Long.

Last Sunday NPR aired a short feature on summer jobs.  During microphone checks, Morning Edition anchors have been asking guests about summer positions that influenced their life’s work. The responses have been so good that NPR is doing a series on the topic.

Hearing this radio feature, along with our recent trip to Philadelphia, got me thinking about one of my most memorable jobs–summer or otherwise. In June of 1989 I was working as a prep cook at the White Dog Cafe at 34th and Samson Streets when I got a call from an architect asking if I wanted a job. I was majoring in architecture at Penn, and had tried unsuccessfully all spring to find work in a design office. The economy was in a slump in the late 80’s, and no entry level jobs were available. But in the early summer, the architect’s firm, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris, landed a project with the City of Philadelphia. The scope was huge and the time line was short. It involved going to prison.

After a quick interview between restaurant shifts, I was offered the job with the firm. I gave notice at the White Dog, and two weeks later reported for work at KTH.  There I met with the other new recruits: three graduate architecture students from Penn, and a classmate of mine from the undergraduate program. All five of us were women in our twenties. Our task for the summer: to prepare a National Historic Landmark Building Assessment Report on Eastern State Penitentiary, an historic, abandoned prison built in 1829. We were to survey the entire complex of twenty-one buildings and document their condition.  I was instructed to buy boots, an army surplus jumpsuit and a particulate mask because the buildings were ridden with hazardous materials, including asbestos and pigeon guano, a source of histoplasmosis.  

For the next two months, the five of us–the self-dubbed “Prison Babes”– surveyed Eastern State in the sweltering Philadelphia heat.  The facility had closed in 1970 after several security breaches, including a riot. The ensuing twenty years of abandonment had produced a ruin of epic proportions. We were the first ones in to document the buildings’ condition in detail, the foot soldiers of a group of preservationists committed to saving Eastern State from continued decay, inappropriate development, or demolition.  Considered a model for prisoner reformation in the 19th century, the penitentiary’s hub-and spoke plan was copied at 300 prisons worldwide.  It was visited in 1826 by the Marquis de La Fayette, and in 1842 by Charles Dickens. Willie Sutton and Al Capone were among its 20th century inmates.  

The base of the wall along Corinthian Street is twice as thick as I was tall.

From the street, Eastern State’s massive perimeter wall betrayed no hint of fallibility. On the inside, however, the buildings showcased every type of catastrophic architectural failure, from collapsed roofs to stone walls shredded by invasive weeds. The partner overseeing the project taught a class at Penn called “Building Pathology,” a sort of gross anatomy course for architects. The prison was his dream lab.

For safety and efficiency, we worked in pairs. The fifth team member, the most senior graduate student, kept us moving at a clip in order to meet our August deadline. We measured cavernous corridors, stepped into every cell, and produced plans & photographic records of fourteen cellblocks, death row, the kitchen, observatory, laundry and administration buildings, and the perimeter wall.

Danger was everywhere at Eastern State, and we became good at sizing it up. As young women living in a big, crime-filled city, we were qualified beyond our architectural credentials to do our job. Our eyes swept rooms like searchlights–down to rotting floor boards, up to crumbling ceilings, sideways to missing guardrails. When we walked on a roof, we noticed subtle changes in the bounce of its substrate.  If we approached a vaulted ceiling open to the sky, we checked the height of pigeon droppings at the perimeter to determine how old and stable the damage was.  Creepy creaks and crashes, we learned, came not from squatters but from the dozens of feral cats that roamed the prison. We sidestepped carcasses of rats, cats, birds, and squirrels, and hoisted our measuring tapes over rusting bed frames in the infirmary.  Our pay was $6.50 an hour. Back at the office, we made a collage of magazine ads showing glamorous architects supervising the construction of high-rises, rolls of blueprints under their Rolex-clad wrists.

In 1989, Eastern State Penitentiary was an assault on the senses. It was also serenely beautiful, an immense ruin in a city obsessed with skyscrapers. That summer the imposing, eleven-acre site belonged only to us, the Prison Babes. The original penitentiary consisted of seven vaulted, sky-lit cellblocks radiating out from a central observatory. But Eastern State had devolved through the centuries into a crowded maze of wedge-shaped buildings that proved vulnerable first to prisoner uprisings, and then the elements. I knew every building like the back of my hand. I also knew that incalculable suffering was caused and felt by the inmates once incarcerated there.

At other times in my life, the ghosts of Eastern State may have proved overwhelming. But not that summer.  My personal life also lay in ruin, having recently lost my roommate to a car crash and then my boyfriend’s love to the hottie in the apartment beneath mine.  Eastern State offered an unlikely refuge for me to feel in command of something meaningful, something bigger and more tragic than my own heartbreak. My family made several trips from Louisville to see me, and each time I took them to the prison. They walked with me to far-flung rooms throughout the complex that I’d strung together for their exceptional beauty, decay, and poignancy. We’d end the tour atop the observatory tower at the very center of the site. Access to its highest level–an exterior steel grate catwalk–required a ladder climb over an open shaft. I’d take three deep breaths before I could scale it. The reward was a view of the decrepit kingdom I’d mastered. Discernible among the sea of rusted roofs was the original, elegant plan that made the building famous around the world. Beyond the prison’s perimeter wall rose the Philadelphia skyline.

Today our house is filled with tape measures like the ones I used at Eastern State half my life ago.  In my hurried return home from job sites, I’ll set my surveying gear on the dining room table to free my arms for my children’s hugs. Soon afterward, I’ll find them yanking the printed tape all the way out of its housing. “Mom, this chair is one-forty pounds!”, my four year old will announce authoritatively. A few weeks ago, he sat on the kitchen counter and “fished” with one of the tapes. The silver box was his reel, and the long, extended tape formed his line. “He is on the leading edge of thought,” I realized, just like spiritual leaders say children will always be. My son saw the measuring tape not for what it was or is, but for what it could be. That’s why we’re mortal, why life delights in new life.  At twenty-one, I stood on the leading edge of thought about what Eastern State Penitentiary could be. Many others have helped push that edge miles beyond what I measured with my tape. Our collective efforts through the years have crested over and saved a hauntingly beautiful monument that’s now visited by 250,000 people each year.