Eastern State Penitentiary in 1929

Eastern State Penitentiary posted this short silent film on its official channel in 2010. An opening card explains that it is excerpted from a 30-minute silent film made in 1929 to mark the hundredth anniversary of the prison’s opening, and closing cards credit funding from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council through the Preservation Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

With intertitles in place of narration, the film shows the main gate, a floor plan of the cells and the long, vaulted, skylit corridors, then lingers on daily routine: men in the yard, a crowded mess hall, inmates at work in shops and on repairs to windows and skylights, and a caged songbird in a small garden. Near the end, a card notes that buses carried inmates each morning to build the new prison farm at Graterford. It was filmed in the year Al Capone arrived at Eastern State.

Footage like this is the antidote to the ghost-tour image of Eastern State as a crumbling ruin. In 1929 the prison was a crowded, working institution: the solitary “Pennsylvania system” had been formally abandoned in 1913, the building held about 1,700 men by the mid-1920s, and the film shows inmates eating, working and moving together in a way the original design never intended.

It is also an official portrait made for an anniversary, so it shows the prison as its managers wanted it seen – orderly, industrious, even hopeful, as one card about flowers in the yard makes clear. Many of the stories now told on ghost tours, including tales about Capone’s cell, come from decades later; this is the place before the legends.