Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary
— — the prison the fog finishes.
Not only on a wall.
“A small sandstone island a mile and a quarter from the city, surrounded by water cold enough to discourage swimming on its own. The federal penitentiary closed in 1963 after twenty-nine years. The cellhouse still stands above the parade ground, the lighthouse still works, and the gulls outnumber visitors most mornings. The National Park Service runs the ferries out of Pier 33.
Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Alcatraz is a 22-acre island in San Francisco Bay, 1.25 miles offshore from Fisherman's Wharf. It served as a United States military fort from the 1850s, a military prison from 1907, and a federal maximum-security penitentiary from 1934 until Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered it closed in March 1963 over the rising cost of saltwater corrosion repair. From November 1969 to June 1971 a coalition of Native American activists occupied the island in protest, an event credited with shaping the modern American Indian Movement. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area now manages it.
The island carries an unusual acoustic. Sound off the bay rolls in steadily, gulls work the cliffs, and the cellhouse itself is one of the quietest rooms in the National Park system once the audio tour pulls visitors into headphones. The 1962 escape of Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, never officially solved, lives in the C Block cells they vacated, plaster heads on the pillows. Most ferries return half-empty in the last hour, and the boat ride back is the trip many visitors remember most.
Access is by ferry only, run under National Park Service contract from Pier 33 on the Embarcadero. Tickets sell out weeks in advance for summer weekends and the night tour. The Cellhouse Audio Tour, narrated by former inmates and guards, runs about forty-five minutes through the main cellblock and dining hall. The climb from the dock to the cellhouse rises about 130 feet over a quarter mile, with switchback grades for visitors with limited mobility. The west side closes February through September for seabird nesting.