Pelican Pen

The Spanish christened it Isla de los Alcatraces, Isle of Pelicans. But to generations of moviegoers and newspaper readers, the island in San Francisco Bay has been better known as the Rock, the ultimate roost for a tougher kind of fowl --the jailbird. Alcatraz was decommissioned as a prison in 1970 and is now part of the Golden Gate Recreation Area. Since it was opened to the public by the National Park Service last October, the U.S. equivalent of Devil's Island has become San Francisco's biggest tourist attraction.

To date, more than 60,000 visitors have paid two dollars each for the round-trip boat ride and one-hour guided tour of the pen. Though there are 13 scheduled tours a day, come gale, fog or high water, tickets for weekends and holidays are sold out a month in advance. Tourists include some of the Indians who occupied Alcatraz in 1970, penologists, historians, police officers, prison wardens, troops of schoolchildren and an occasional former inmate (one ex-con insisted on getting married there, so that his wife would understand what he had been through).

The ordeal that he and other inmates endured is not underplayed. A staff of 13 young, well-briefed Park Service rangers go deep into Rock lore: the men who came there, how they were treated and mistreated, how they lived, died and plotted escape. "Men were never sent directly to Alcatraz," Ranger Jane Rowley points out. "They always came as transfers and were considered the hardcore troublemakers, the incorrigibles.

This was never a place of rehabilitation." In the freezing rows of three-tiered cell blocks--one called Michigan Avenue, another Broadway--Ranger Sara Conklin says (with some exaggeration), "Most prisoners died of pneumonia."

Leading her charges into the isolation wing, Sara explains that prisoners relegated to the "strip" or "oriental" cells were left naked, without blankets or light. "Try it," she tells a group of students. "Go into the cell, and I'll close the door, and you pretend you have to stay in there alone, 24 hours a day." After five minutes, the kids emerge, solemn-faced and committed to lives of virtue. Next, Sara points down ten stone steps to the "dungeon of Alcatraz." That was where the prison authorities would try to break a man, she explains, "when he was still able to say, 'I am me.' His hands were manacled to the walls, there was a lot of putrid water on the floor and lots of rats." The tour includes thumbnail sketches of such famed alumni as Al Capone ("He had syphilis and eventually died of it") and Robert Stroud, the so-called Birdman of Alcatraz ("The movie was a bunch of hooey --Stroud was a nasty person who killed two men").

According to present plans, Alcatraz will be operated as a tourist attraction only for the next five years. Ideas for its future use are solicited from the sightseers, who have suggested, variously, that it should eventually be turned into a West Coast Statue of Liberty, a crab farm, a U.N. memorial, a seminary, an Indian amusement park or a monument to the conquest of space. Some stern-vis-aged visitors think it should become a prison again, but others suggest simply giving it back to the pelicans.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.