Museum or Historical Site?

Eastern State Penitentiary, one of America’s most famous prisons, resembles an American Castle when approached from the outside. With 30 foot walls and iron gates, one is filled with the feeling of visiting royalty rather than a prison.  Even after passing through the gates, it does not feel like a prison until you enter the first cellblock.  All thoughts of royalty escape as you see a row of small doors on either side with decrepit conditions inside each dark cell.

Opened in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) operated for over 142 year before shutting down and left to rot in 1971.  Saved from demolition and opened to the public as a historical site in 1994, ESP has found a new kind of success.  As our tour guide Nick said, it is the new “Scared Straight.”  As Henning wrote, “Even where the museum appears unintelligible to visitors, it can still work to habituate them to certain kinds of modern experience.”  This experience would be to stay out of prison because the conditions are not suited to someone who enjoys their freedom.  ESP was designed to offer the experience of a solipsistic lifestyle. 

As such, it is not a museum but a historical site because it is not asking the visitor to take in the beauty of design but the advancements in building designs that are used for the time when each prisoner has flushing toilets and heat when the President uses a piss pot in the White House.  The first of its kind and copied by many others, it is a model of what works and what does not.