April 10, 2023: Eastern State Penitentiary, a former prison turned museum. It closed in 1971 and had been abandoned for decades. The National Historic Landmark has since been turned into a place where the historic preservation, interpretation, and public programs “move visitors to engage in dialogue and deepen the national conversation about criminal justice.”Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
When it opened in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary was the most famous and expensive prison in the world. Today the long-abandoned and crumbling cell blocks and empty guard towers are not preserved for tourists to make selfies and ruin porn, but to interpret the legacy of American criminal justice reform. A prison system that today incarcerates more people than any other in the world had its roots here.
Before Eastern State, most prisons were just crowded and dirty pens where people - adults and children - accused of everything from petty theft to murder, were held while awaiting their court date. My colleague Samantha Melamed wrote last year that the use of incarceration as punishment, rather than merely a means of pre-trial detention, was born out of Philadelphia Quaker ideals — proposed as an alternative “to public humiliations and corporal punishment.”
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I was there last week for the graduation of the city’s first Carpentry Academy, a program in partnership with the Carpenter’s union, local businesses and Eastern State to give women and people of color a pathway to hard-to-get union apprenticeships. Participants were introduced to the construction industry with paid, hands-on-the-job training and experience, including work on restoration projects at Eastern State. Their story will be coming out this week.
The windows in the working public restrooms were broken during the decades when Eastern State was a heavily vandalized, decaying eyesore. Like the rest of the prison, the restrooms have been safely and securely preserved for visitors. Here’s an alternative version of this week’s photo:
I wrote here last week about the 25th anniversary of my weekly photo column in the legacy print version of the newspaper. Yesterday the Sunday paper published a selection of twelve black and white images from the over 1400 that have run in that space in The Inquirer’s local news section.
Here are the most recent, in color:
April 3, 2023: Giant figures of the gods parade through an arch at the Hoyu Folk Culture Festival in Chinatown, celebrating a tradition from China’s Fujian province. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 27, 2023: The Public Services Building, headquarters of the Philadelphia Police Department and other offices, is reflected in a puddle along North Broad at Buttonwood Street. The historic eighteen-story Beaux-Arts style skyscraper and former Inquirer and Daily News building - until the newspapers moved out in 2012 - opened in 1925 as the Elverson Building and in 1996, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 20, 2023: The moon rises behind the buildings along North 33rd and Oxford Streets in Strawberry Mansion as the sun sets in front of them following a day of rain. This section of the street is named in honor of saxophonist and jazz pioneer John Coltrane, who lived there in the 1950s. The home ( just out of the frame, to the right) is a National Historic Landmark.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 13, 2023: A worker in a nearby building calls it a flame, while to some it’s a duckpin bowling pin. Seeing it in its full 51-foot size, with the accompanying six-foot-
high glob of paint on the sidewalk below, it is easier to recognize the Claes Oldenburg sculpture “Paint Torch” outside the Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts as a brush lifted into the sky “in a depiction of the act of painting a picture.” Installed in 2011, Oldenburg’s work honors the act of
painting, but its form also doubles “as a torch and a symbol of liberty in homage to the city’s historical significance as the birthplace of America,”
PAFA says.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 6, 2023: Along a wall in Frankford, where long wintertime shadows are getting shorter now as we move closer to the spring equinox (Mar. 20) and summer, when the sun’s light moves higher in the sky (making for less dramatic photographer-friendly shadows). Also, this weekend we’ll be getting an extra hour of sunshine with the start of Daylight Saving Time (Mar. 12 ) Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 27, 2023: Robert Turner, with the Capitol Preservation Committee, cleans the Moravian tiled floor after hours in the rotunda of the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. The committee has directed numerous projects to restore, conserve, and preserve the art, architecture, and history of the Capital and other Capitol Complex buildings. The Capitol holds the largest single collection of Moravian tiles created by Henry Chapman Mercer, who founded the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown in 1899.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 20, 2023: Kory Aversa (left) pauses to TikTok as he enters the Disney100 exhibit at the Franklin Institute during a preview for the media, influencers and Disney fan club gold members. The exhibition, “celebrating 100 years of the Walt Disney Co." opened on Saturday.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 13, 2023: Repairs are made on the facade of the Pennsylvania Convention Center on North Broad Street.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 6, 2023: An anthropomorphic scene in a Temple University parking lot.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
January 30, 2023: The umbrellas are out during a snowless winter — so far — in Center City, along Arch Street near 12th. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
January 23, 2023: JoAnn Baldwin photographs the opening processional at the annual service commemorating the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Zion Baptist Church of Philadelphia on North Broad Street.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
January 16, 2023: Taking care of business on the ground floor after hours at the School District of Philadelphia Administration Building, while the Board of Education meets upstairs. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
January 9. 2023: Ravers enter the Convention Center for the HiJinx music festival just before the end of 2022. The two-night event has become a New Year’s Eve tradition in Philadelphia with dubstep and future bass heavy-hitters as headliners. (The sign refers to the sports and gaming slang term “Full Send,” meaning going all out at a task or activity, usually without thinking through the risks or consequences.) Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
January 2, 2023: Crews sweep up the confetti left on the Convention Center floor between performances of the Fancy Brigade Finale, a part of Philadelphia’s Mummers 2023 parade, Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
December 26, 2022: Amanda Nolan (left) and Michelle Lally (with Kelce, as in the Eagles’ center and would-be Mummer Jason Kelce) pose with a cardboard cutout of Jim Gardner during a tailgate party where fans gathered to watch the veteran 6ABC broadcast icon anchor his final 6 p.m. newscast. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
