These days if you walk around the Fairmount neighborhood of Philadelphia, you'll see

cafes and bistros, all of which are close to the city's big art museums.

It's a neighborhood where you could grab a drink

and then stop by the Rodin Museum.

But just a few blocks away,

a giant wagon wheel structure looms,

a massive, empty, and quite infamous old prison.

Go inside and it is a world away from the sheik streets of Fairmont.

Inside are these whole... from the sheik streets of Fairmont.

Inside are these hallways that look like they go on forever.

These hugely tall arch ceilings,

but all among them the paint is peeling the plaster is cracking it is this place of

abandonment enormous abandonment this is Eastern State Penitentiary.

When this prison was built 200 years ago,

Eastern State Penitentiary was meant to be a model for what prisons could be, clean, top of the line, fundamentally humane.

A model that quickly went horribly wrong.

I'm Dylanthearis and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we're heading to Philadelphia to go inside Eastern State Penitentiary

and learn from its lofty intentions,

its terrible failings, and its rebirth in a new form.

That is all after this. Before Before we have to talk about Eastern State Penitentiary, we have to talk about what came

before it. The Walnut Street Jail, built in Philadelphia in 1773.

...