by J. Nathan Matias
The Voices of Eastern State
If you want to fully experience the audio tour at Eastern State Penitentiary, throw away your map.
The audio tour's first ten stops can be followed in line. The voices tell visitors where to walk. But the tour's creators are less interested in guiding visitors through a prescribed path than encouraging visitors to explore and experience the wonder and beauty of the decaying prison.
Wandering through this decaying ruin of a prison, one can feel the weight of years. The layers of sorrow and malice building up for over a century, come peeling slowly off the plastered walls with the passage of time.
The prison lays silent save the creak of ancient wood-beams, the echo of footsteps, or the drips from some unseen crack that catches the rain. The audio tour speaks where the building cannot. And yet, by encouraging visitors to explore the prison, the tour's creators preserve an almost-mystical experience of discovery and imagination.
As visitors explore, they will see gray circles labeled with numbers. They enter the code into their audio devices and listen to the voices of former prison inmates, employees, and guards. Some stops describe the surrounding area and explain its history through time. Other stops tell stories relating to the given section of the prison. Yet others reveal something about daily life at Eastern State during its years of operation.
- Audio tour map and audio excerpts are from The Voices of Eastern State, the audio tour of the Eastern State Penitentiary. Reproduced with permission.