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 Rodan 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 chic streets of Fairmount.

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

These hugely tall arched 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 Dylan Therese 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 we talk about Eastern State Penitentiary, we have to talk about what came before it.

The Walnut Street Jail built in Philadelphia in 1773.

In the Walnut Street Jail, men, women and, yes, even children were all held together

in giant rooms.

...