{"id":9091,"date":"2018-09-13T11:35:03","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T15:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/?p=9091"},"modified":"2019-10-01T12:27:35","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T16:27:35","slug":"stories-from-pittsburghs-dungeon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/2018\/09\/13\/stories-from-pittsburghs-dungeon\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories from Pittsburgh’s dungeon"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
One of the narrow cells in the basement of Western Penitentiary\u2019s rotunda. (Photos by Steve Mellon and Nate Guidry\/Post-Gazette)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the earliest accounts of Pittsburgh\u2019s dungeon comes from Alexander Berkman, the anarchist sentenced to 22 years in prison for attempting to kill Henry Clay Frick in 1892.<\/span><\/p>\n

While serving time at Western Penitentiary, Berkman was caught with a small knife in his pocket. He claimed the knife was planted. No matter. Guards stripped Berkman of his coat and shoes, marched him down a steep flight of steps and thrust him into a narrow basement cell with thick double doors.<\/span><\/p>\n

The experience terrified Berkman. In his book \u201cPrison Memoirs of an Anarchist,\u201d he described the cell\u2019s darkness as \u201cmassive\u201d and \u201cpalpable.\u201d It so robbed Berkman of his sense of direction that he stood motionless, afraid to budge. He wrote of a \u201csinister silence,\u201d broken only by the gnawing and scurrying of rats. \u201cThe floor is cold and clammy,\u201d Berkman wrote. \u201cThe gnawing grows louder and nearer, and I am filled with dread lest the starving rats attack my bare feet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Exhausted, Berkman leaned against a stone wall and slumped down. He felt the \u201cslimy creeping\u201d of an unknown creature on his face. Horrified, he rose and determined to pace in the tiny cell.<\/span><\/p>\n

A guard finally arrived to deliver a slice of bread and a cup of water. Berkman expressed relief that his three-day sentence in the cell was nearing its end. The guard offered bad news: Only one day had passed. Berkman\u2019s sense of time had vanished.<\/span><\/p>\n

Western Penitentiary closed in 2017. With its looming stone-and-brick facade, parts of which date back 136 years, the prison stands as an ominous monument to emptiness. Convict artwork slowly fades from walls. Fallen chunks of paint, some the size of a dinner plates, litter floors in the old cell blocks. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Exterior of two cells in the prison basement. (Steve Mellon and Nate Guidry\/Post-Gazette)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the bowels of the prison, the dungeon remains. During a recent tour, a few of us from the Post-Gazette walked down a down a series of steps in the prison rotunda and entered a dimly lighted basement. There we found two narrow side-by-side cells — they appear to be about four feet wide and eight feet long. Rust has eaten away the edges of the cells\u2019 steel doors. Cracked paint, stained with filth, covers the walls. It\u2019s been decades since prisoners experienced the cell\u2019s deep darkness. In the mid 1950s, state investigators described the cells as \u201cmedieval\u201d and recommended they be abolished.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Berkman\u2019s day, however, the dungeon was a place of punishment for those declared \u201crefractory.\u201d Sometimes prisoners were chained to steel rings secured to cell walls. Berkman wrote about an African-American prisoner named Lancaster chained in a dungeon cell for 10 days.<\/span><\/p>\n

Berkman left the prison in 1905. Three years later the dungeon turned up in a story written for The Pittsburgh Press by an unnamed prisoner. He claimed authorities were punishing convicts accused of minor offenses by cramming them into the dungeon cells \u201clike rats in a cage.\u201d Prisoners who\u2019d accumulated violations throughout the week were routed from bed at 5 a.m. on Sunday to begin their punishment, he wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n

That account squared with the experience of Walter E. Nelson, who records indicate began serving time in 1905 for writing worthless checks. One day guards caught Nelson with an unlit stogie in his mouth. He expected some form of punishment but nothing severe for such a small infraction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then came Sunday. Guards woke Nelson in the early morning darkness and lead him to the basement, where he joined about 20 other prisoners, some as young as 17 years of age.<\/span><\/p>\n

A deputy ordered the prisoners to remove their shoes, then packed the convicts into a dungeon cell. Crowded in darkness, the prisoners remained standing for 10 hours. \u201cIt would not have been so bad if all the prisoners had been men,\u201d Nelson wrote in The Pittsburgh Press in February 1911. \u201cBut among the 21 offenders there were the three boys and they were forced to listen to language that would have made the devil himself blush.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Picture of a basement cell in The Pittsburgh Press, 1936.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1936, the dungeon — known also as the \u201chole\u201d — came to the attention of Pennsylvania State Troopers conducting a fire inspection of the prison. \u201cTake a good picture of the \u2018hole,\u2019\u201d one prisoner called out to the troopers. \u201cThey\u2019ve been cleaning it out for a week.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Another convict shouted, \u201cI spent 46 days down there without food.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a liar,\u201d said warden Stanley Ashe.<\/span><\/p>\n

After a January 1953 prison riot, state investigators looking into prisoner complaints took notice of the dungeon, a place \u201conly hardened lawbreakers talked about among themselves,\u201d the Press reported. The heat there was \u201cvirtually intolerable at times and the stench was terrible,\u201d the inspectors wrote. \u201cThese medieval dungeons can only produce harm and \u2026 their very existence stands as an indictment against the prison administration.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The infamous dungeon was then replaced by a block of 10 solitary confinement cells that differed little from normal cells.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cells in the “hole” turned up in the news again in December 1973, after prison guard Capt. Walter Peterson was beaten to death by three inmates in a basement recreation area reserved for prisoners considered dangerous. <\/span>One of those inmates was the notorious Stanley Hoss, serving a life sentence for killing a Verona police officer. Hoss had also admitted to murdering a mother and her two-year-old daughter.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of Peterson\u2019s murder, Warden Gilbert Walters ordered all inmates locked in their cells — \u201cinmates considered dangerous will be placed in the basement seclusion area, once known as the dungeon,\u201d the PG reported. Stays there might last hours or days, Walters said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Authorities transferred Hoss out of Western Penitentiary.\u00a0In 1978, he hung himself in a cell at the State Correctional Institute at Graterford, near Philadelphia.<\/span><\/p>\n

— Steve Mellon<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Basement cells at a now vacant prison once terrified those confined there.<\/p>\n

Look at the picturesStories from Pittsburgh’s dungeon<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[947,945],"tags":[975,1275,980,1025,1036,1420,1244],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Digs.20180828_Prisob03.jpg?fit=2500%2C1668&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9424,"url":"https:\/\/newsinteractive.post-gazette.com\/thedigs\/2019\/04\/30\/the-lost-issues-of-the-pittsburgh-courier\/","url_meta":{"origin":9091,"position":0},"title":"The lost issues of the Pittsburgh Courier","date":"April 30, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"A decade of important journalism is missing from local and national archives. 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