The Unofficial Alcatraz Handbook

INTRODUCTION TO ALCATRAZ ISLAND
 
When I dug into the dirt and my spade struck something, my first thought was, I’ve hit a rock. But as I pulled the object from the dirt, it didn’t feel anything like a rock. It wasn’t heavy enough, and it had a shape and texture that could only be described as bone--like. It was round and white and fit easily into the palm of my hand—-a bone! I think what disturbed me most was where I’d found this bone: I’d unearthed it on Alcatraz Island while removing weeds during a garden restoration project in 2008.

To be exact, I came upon the bone in the prisoners’ gardens on the island’s windy west side, very near where a set of steep concrete stairs still led down from the prison’s recreation yard to a replica guard shack. When it operated as a prison, this was the path the convicts took every day through a metal detector to go to their day jobs on the island. As I held the hollow bone, I wondered if it might belong to a person. It looked like a cut piece of leg bone. How did it end up here? I’d already heard stories from other gardeners about finding things in the dirt, mostly handballs that had sailed over the towering rec--yard wall decades ago. Anything we discovered was considered an artifact and belonged to the island. We had to turn all “finds” over to the head gardener.

A volunteer gardener next to me saw me holding the bone.

“Cool,” he said. “You found something.”

Was finding a bone cool? Maybe.

“How do you think it got here?” I asked.

I watched a lot of true--crime shows. My mind leaped to murder.

“It’s a beef bone. They disposed of a lot of kitchen waste in this area,” he said. “You never know what you’ll find out here. It’s a very magical place.”

All in all, beef bone included, it turned out to be a good first day volunteering on Alcatraz, even though I’d dressed wrong for hard--core gardening. But soon I would be given a maroon hoodie with a bright purple iris on it that all the volunteers wore. Later I’d receive a gold pin with my name stamped in black. Week after week, I walked along the Embarcadero, a waterfront boulevard in San Francisco, and boarded the staff ferry at Pier 33. I liked sitting on the top level of the boat, watching the island cliff grow closer and closer as we lunged toward it through gray, choppy water. I felt lucky to be traveling to the prison island. Maybe you think I’ve been curious about Alcatraz my whole life, and that’s why I ended up volunteering as a gardener there. It’s true that some people are obsessed with everything Alcatraz, but that’s not me. Like so many other good things in my life, my time on Alcatraz just sort of happened.

Here’s the story: When I moved to San Francisco, I looked for a way to volunteer. I wanted to meet people and find new things to do. I’d grown up sandwiched between small farms in Idaho, so I knew a little bit about gardening. I searched online for projects I could join. The Alcatraz restoration project caught my attention right away because it said I’d get a free weekly boat ride and a special hat. Who could pass up that?

When I finally made it onto the island, so much of the restoration project had already been done. Using old photographs as guides for re-creating the planting beds, gardeners had torn out decades of overgrowth—-weeds, blackberries, out--of--control rose bushes—-and then repopulated the military officers’ gardens and warden’s garden, plant by plant and flower by flower. I got there in time to help put back the prisoners’ gardens.

Every half hour, large crowds of people exited the boat and pressed up the steep switchback to enter the old shower room in the lower part of the cell house to pick up their headsets and start the audio tour. Lost tourists who’d strayed from the recorded instructions often wandered up to me to ask where to return their headsets. But even after the first two months, I had never taken the prison tour. I had to figure out where to send them. I didn’t know much about the remaining buildings on the island or the many layers of history here. I passed the cannon in the sally port (the entry soldiers once had used) every week, but it took me a month before I learned that Alcatraz had previously been a fort. Visit after visit, I discovered new things.

After two years of answering questions from off-track tourists, I took some training courses and became a tour guide, helping lead visitors through the newly restored gardens. The tours grew so large we needed two guides: a head and a tail. I liked being the tail. I helped open and reset chains and barricades, and I steered curious tourists away from nesting seabirds. Visitors were drawn like magnets to newly hatched seagull chicks, often seeming not to hear the ear--piercing screams of the baby birds’ aggressive moms. (Trust me, you do not want to tangle with an angry seagull!)

I spent a lot of my time answering questions from visitors who didn’t want to interrupt the lead tour guide. I bet I’ve been asked at least a thousand questions about Alcatraz. Sometimes the same ones pop up over and over. Where was Al Capone’s cell? Did anybody ever escape? Why are there so many birds? Could the island be turned into a golf course or a zoo?

I didn’t always know the answers. The one firm rule I’d been given was that I wasn’t allowed to invent information. So as the questions piled up, I decided to hunt down answers. And although I didn’t mean to, I eventually became an unofficial Alcatraz expert.

I ended up spending so much time on the island that I got invited to attend the Alcatraz Alumni Association gatherings, a reunion of former convicts and prison guards that happened every year on the island. Up till then, I’d never met a bank robber. Just like that, I met two: Darwin Coon and Robert Luke. They were sent to Alcatraz because in addition to being bank robbers, they were escape risks. When I met them in 2010, it was hard for me to picture either Darwin or Robert locked up in cellblocks A, B, C, or D, as they strolled past the closed cells, making their way to the annual buffet for lunch.

Hearing the former convicts and guards tell their stories fascinated me. I liked learning about prison life, but I also liked listening to them talk about what they did afterward. I wanted to hear about the lives they had made for themselves after they were released. People clamored for pictures and autographs. But I felt shy around them. When they spoke to big groups about their time in prison (which is what the big groups always wanted to hear about), both bespectacled old men made an effort to share personal details. Their toughened personalities never fully softened, but they always did a good job capturing the crowd’s attention. Being around Darwin and Robert made me think about crime and prisons in a different way. I had heard a lot of stories of prisoners serving their time on Alcatraz and leaving the prison system with a new skill or trade and going on to live a crime--free life.

Turns out, I couldn’t garden on Alcatraz forever. After a few years, I fell in love with another writer, we moved to the other side of the country, and I became a mom. So I gave up my work as a gardener and a tour guide. Whenever anybody finds out I used to be a volunteer gardener on Alcatraz, they have lots of questions. And I try really hard to answer every single one.

This book includes answers to the twenty most often asked questions I remember getting from visitors on the island.

But the number one question people ask on Alcatraz is: Where are the bathrooms? Just so you know, there are two public bathrooms, and I’ve included a handy map that shows their exact locations. You’ll notice that in addition to the questions, this book includes sections called “You Can Still See It Today.” I spent so many Sunday mornings giving tours and pointing out all the historic details that I want to make sure everybody can see them here, too, and notice all the special little layers of history tucked away or sometimes hidden in plain sight.
 
CHAPTER 1
How did Alcatraz get its name?
 
The story of how Alcatraz got its name comes with a few twists. Historically speaking, Alcatraz hasn’t always been important. In fact, it wasn’t even noticed. When European explorers sailed along the coast of California, claiming territory for the Spanish and later the British crowns, they failed to see San Francisco Bay and sailed right past it for two hundred years. Either fog obscured it, or the placement of Alcatraz right in the center of the Golden Gate (the strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean) gave the illusion that it was solid coastline. It wasn’t until 1769 that a small group of Spanish soldiers on a land--exploration journey under the command of Gaspar de Portolá overshot their real destination, Monterey Bay, and stumbled across the San Francisco Bay on foot.

The Spanish entered San Francisco Bay by ship for the first time in 1775. They mapped and named all the larger islands. Charts from this time appear to label the island currently called Yerba Buena as the Isla de los Alcatraces. For fifty years, Spanish maps labeled Yerba Buena Island Alcatraces, and the island we now know as Alcatraz remained unlabeled. Alcatraz didn’t get its current name until 1827, when British officer Captain Frederick Beechey put the name Alcatraces next to present-day Alcatraz Island and added the label Yerba Buena next to present-day Yerba Buena Island. A lot of people refer to Alcatraz as the “Island of Pelicans,” but that might not be totally accurate.

The Spanish word for a “seabird” is alcatraz, and the Spanish word for “seabirds” is alcatraces. So the Isla de los Alcatraces could refer to pelicans, cormorants, gannets, or maybe all of these. Here are just a few of the names that were once used for the island: Alcatras, Alcatrose, Alcatrazas, Alcatrazos, Alcatruces, Alcatrus, and Alcatraz.

But was anyone on the island before Europeans arrived? Located 1.25 miles off the coast of the city of San Francisco, it’s likely either the Muwekma Ohlone or the Coast Miwok canoed to the island. There’s no proof that First Nations settled or lived on the island in any permanent way. Some people think that both the Ohlone and Miwok visited the island to forage for seabird eggs. Since First Nations pass down their traditions and histories orally, and much of their cultures were wiped out after Europeans arrived, there’s no clear answer for how, or if, the Ohlone or Miwok used Alcatraz.

The earliest days of Alcatraz are a mystery. What we do know is that it was a perfect sanctuary for nesting seabirds, and we’re pretty sure it was covered in white bird poop. Exactly how the Muwekma Ohlone or Coast Miwok used the rock island for three thousand years is something we’ll just continue to wonder about.
 
You Can Still See It Today
A common nickname for this island is “The Rock.” If you walk along the main road that leads to the top of the island and the prison cell house, you’ll pass tall rock cliffs that look like a giant, dark, hard wall. This is the actual sandstone that the island of Alcatraz is made out of. Reach out and drag your hand along it; you’re touching The Rock.