Alcatraz Island - San Francisco Bay

These days the Alcatraz Island is a tourist attraction and is open all the time to tours. It is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. People who want to visit Alcatraz Island do so by ferry ride, they leave at Pier 33 close to Fisherman’s Wharf.

The very first person to ever set foot on the Island was a man named Juan de Ayala, way back in 1775, he named the place Island of the Pelicans, kind of a gentle name for the place that the Rock was destined to become…

The gold rush came in 1848 to California and gold has a way of attracting people, people came to California by the thousands, many of them in ships. This was a situation that called for a lighthouse so in 1853 the first lighthouse was built on Alcatraz Island, it was the typical lighthouse design and it brought the ships safely into port for the next 56 years, they then took the grand old lighthouse down and put up a newer more improved lighthouse. Along with the new lighthouse, they also started construction of the Alcatraz prison.

The first person to legally own the Island of Alcatraz was a man named Julian Workman, later on, the island was bought by another man and then the US Government managed to get its hands on the Island.

In 1848 the Army started studying the Island of Alcatraz for strategic defense of the San Francisco Bay, it was right around 1858 that the first garrison set up camp on Alcatraz Island, the Island was heavily fortified and was used as a prison for confederate sympathizers during the American Civil War.

It was in 1866 that the army decided that the Island needed upgrading and that newer guns were going to be needed if Alcatraz was going to remain a fortified defensive for San Francisco…the upgrade never got completed and the army then decided that instead of a military fortification they were going to use the Rock as a military prison. So in 1868 the Alcatraz Island was officially designated a detention facility for military prisoners; they built a good Jailhouse out of brick and Alcatraz came into business.

In 1909 construction was started on a big concrete cell block, it was and still is the dominant feature of the Island, to be able to build the new cell blocks they had to tear down to barracks all the way down to the ground floor, the ground floor survived because it had been built under ground to enhance the defensive efficiency of the place. It became known as the Dungun later on.

People that came to serve out their prison terms on Alcatraz were varied prisoners of the military.

Alcatraz was a minimum security prison for the military and most of the men there were serving out short sentences for small crimes but as in any prison there were a few that had a long time to serve in the prison because of the horrendous things that they had done. The Prison of Alcatraz was very strict when it came to discipline and punishment, it was swift for those who did not obey the rules. One of the worst at the time was to be sent to solitary confinement and be given a meager diet of bred and water.

Because of the low security of the island many prisoners thought that they could make an escape and many tried, the only problem with their plans was that the waters around the Rock were very cold and the currents were very strong, the ones that did not turn back to be rescued drowned in the icy waters of the San Francisco Bay.

As the years passed, the rules and regulation relaxed and the prisoners were allowed to build a football field and there were even boxing nights were two selected prisoners would have a go at each other. These boxing matches became so popular that people even came from the city to see who was going to win.

The Prison closed in 1913 and the Justice Department took over, one chapter of the Island’s history was over; another was about to begin…but that is a different story.