PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Scaling walls. Fleeing in broad daylight. Escaping into nearby residential territory.
No, we’re not talking about the Danilo Cavalcante manhunt which gripped the Philadelphia region for 14 days at the end of the summer.
We’re talking about tales from Eastern State Penitentiary, the hulking prison that looks like a gothic castle and takes up more than a full square block right in the middle of Fairmount, one of Philadelphia’s most popular neighborhoods.
Eastern State opened in 1829 and, at the time, was regarded as the most well-known and expensive prison in the world.
A century later, it would house high-profile criminals, like mobster Al Capone and serial bank robber Willie Sutton.
After 140 years of operation, Eastern State closed in the early 1970s. According to the prison, an estimated 100 people incarcerated there tried to get out.
“When it comes to escape, the Chester County Prison [escape] definitely draws comparison to Eastern State,” said Damon McCool, Eastern State Penitentiary’s senior specialist of Research and Special Programming.
You’d be hard-pressed to find many people, at least in the Philadelphia area, who haven’t seen video of how Cavalcante escaped from Chester County Prison on Aug. 31, 2023. The security footage of him scaling up a narrow passageway by a door to the prison got hundreds of thousands of views on social media and YouTube and instantly became an indelible image from the exhaustive search for the 34-year-old, 5-foot-tall, 100-pound convicted killer.
Turns out, walls were a popular method of escape from Eastern State Penitentiary, too.
“Most people who escaped went over the prison walls,” McCool said in an episode of the KYW Newsradio original podcast, “The Jawncast.”
Eastern State’s stone and mortar walls are 30 feet high. They form a perimeter around the prison between Corinthian Avenue and 22nd Street from east to west, and Fairmount Avenue to Brown Street from south to north.
The prison’s most famous wall-scale escape happened in July 1923 and involved half a dozen people incarcerated there. Leo Callahan was the only one who got out and stayed free.
“Several of them were master carpenters, so they built a 30-foot ladder in several smaller pieces that could be easily assembled,” McCool said.
“Somehow, they were able to sneak a revolver into the penitentiary and use that to hold a guard hostage. While the guard was being held hostage, they assembled the ladder, propped it up against the east wall facing Corinthian Avenue, and scaled the wall that way.”
For a while, the prison’s research team believed Callahan, a former marine sentenced to 18.5 to 24 years at Eastern State for assault and battery with an intent to kill, was the only person to escape and never be found.
The prison has since identified three other escapees who snuck out in the 1800s.
“In the 19th century,” McCool said, “when somebody escaped from Eastern State, it was really the prison administration’s job to catch them. The warden would go into the city and personally look for this person, maybe with one or two other people.”
“In the 20th century, we started to see a way more militarized approach to catching somebody when they [escape] prison.”
This strategy was certainly deployed during the manhunt for Cavalcante. By the time he was captured on Sept. 13, the search had swelled to roughly 500 law enforcement officials, with officers teaming up from the Pennsylvania State Police, U.S Marshals, and Border Patrol.
Another way that Cavalcante’s escape from Chester County Prison sparked parallels to Eastern State is that it put the ingenuity and resourcefulness of an incarcerated person on full display.
No escape attempt at Eastern State underscored these qualities more than the escape Clarence Klinedinst and his cellmate, William Russell, tried to pull off.
They managed to dig a tunnel from their cell on the southwest side of the prison all the way to Fairmount Avenue. When it was finished on April 3, 1945, the tunnel spanned 97 feet, and was 15 feet deep.
Twelve people incarcerated at Eastern State, including Klinedinst, Russell, and bank robber Willie Sutton, tried to get out through the tunnel. All of them were caught or turned themselves in.
“The tunnel wasn't scrappy,” McCool said. “It was shored up with wood, it had ventilation, there were lights in it. So it was a very sophisticated build, something that took a really long time and a lot of skill.”
From stealing a milk truck to snagging a gun from a Chester County home, Cavalcante not only proved daring, but elusive during his two weeks on the run.
“The intelligence, creativity, artfulness, ingenuity that's behind prison walls is immeasurable,” McCool said. “Eastern State was full of inventors, musicians, poets, and that's true for people in prisons today.
“Sometimes this intelligence and ingenuity and creativity is often overlooked, and unfortunately, we only hear about it when there's something like an escape. We don't hear when an incarcerated person publishes a book or releases a catalog of music or is nominated for a Nobel Prize or something like that. We really only hear about their creativity and ingenuity when there's something salacious like an escape.”
The starkest contrast between Cavalcante’s escape from Chester County Prison and the escapes that took place at Eastern State Penitentiary, however, can be found in the communities surrounding the two prisons.
After Cavalcante broke out, the ensuing search upended rural, typically tranquil Chester County towns near the prison — both logistically, and psychologically. It wasn’t just that roads were shut down. Schools were, too.
Residents who spoke with KYW Newsradio expressed fear and frustration. In the weeks since the manhunt’s end, the county has held several public meetings to address public concerns.
In Fairmount, Eastern State pretty much became part of the landscape. An oral history project conducted by the prison in 1993 more than two decades after it closed suggested that, generally speaking, people felt secure with having Eastern State in their backyard.
“We just never thought much about it [being] here,” said Raymond Holstein, who grew up blocks from the prison and participated in the Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force Oral History Project.
He said his family didn’t even lock their doors.
“I never remember being told, ‘Don't go near the prison’ or ‘Don't talk to the prisoners.’”
“Whatever [escapees] got over the walls or through the sewers [we assumed] weren't going to hang around here.”
Harry Agzigian, who lived on 21st Street near Eastern State, talked about the alarm sirens that went off when incarcerated people escaped.
“Oh my god,” he said in his oral history project interview. “They had a deep, throaty roar.”
“My dad would sit up in a chair all night with his baseball bat to make sure none of the escaped convicts would try to get into our house.”
Occasional disruption? Yes.
A deterrent that caused outrage and drove people out of Fairmount? Not so much.
“When I read the oral histories of people that lived in the neighborhood, I get the sense that people liked living near the building,” McCool noted. “It's actually when the prison becomes abandoned that the neighborhood starts to disregard it and not like it anymore.”
Agzigian added that it seemed like there were no repercussions from the prison being there.
“People sort of felt the way I did — I’m sure they did. They felt like it was a secure thing. All the [incarcerated people] were in there, and the guards were watching over us. We felt it was a good thing.”
During the Cavalcante manhunt, McCool was following along. He couldn’t help but draw a handful of these connections between the present and past.
“We are not trained to think critically about prisons or people in prisons,” he said. “We're trained not to see them and not to think about them."
“When somebody escapes from prison, it lifts that veil and it makes us confront the issue of prisons and people in prisons in ways that we weren't thinking about before.”