Alcatraz craftsmen take pride in old touches

It was a proud moment on Alcatraz Island the other afternoon for metal craftsmen who had come all the way from Kentucky to put their firm’s name on the walls of the most famous prison in America.

It was a mixed occasion that marked the finishing touch to the restoration of a prison cellblock and a time to reflect on the strange fascination that draws more than a million people a year to one of the most grim places in the country.

Stewart Iron Works of Covington, Ky., had its name all over Alcatraz during the island’s prison years. Stewart built the steel bars and locking mechanism for 336 cells that held some of the country’s worst criminals.

David Heidrich, Stewart’s CEO, stood outside a cell on Block C on Wednesday as Ranger John Cantwell of the National Park Service demonstrated how the mechanism opened and closed the cell doors. Big levers controlled the device, and a whole row of cells opened smoothly, rolling on ball bearings, and slammed shut with a sound that echoed like the crack of doom.

Stewart made the cell doors of hardened steel, designed to defeat what prison architects called “experienced criminals bent on escape.” The mechanism that kept the men locked in cells 5 feet wide and 9 feet long “was state of the art,” and patented when Stewart took the job in 1934. The designers were “mechanical geniuses,” Heidrich said.

Stewart Iron Works was once a leader in prison work, but the company has moved on, Heidrich said. Now the company specializes in highend iron and metal products, including decorative fencing. Stewart designed the fence around the White House, the gates on the locks at the Panama Canal, and the elegant fence around the house of the president of Princeton University.

“We gave up jail work years ago,” Heidrich said, “before I took over the company.”

But pride in craftsmanship and a sense of history led Heindrich to Alcatraz, now one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world.

Alcatraz, he believes, is part of the American experience. And his firm had a hand in it. Not many companies built bars that held Al Capone or Machine Gun Kelly or Alvin Karpis, the FBI’s only Public Enemy No. 1 to be taken alive.

Maybe the stories draw tourists to Alcatraz, a place that is famous for being famous. “Nobody goes to see Leavenworth, or some country jail,” said Brian Tome, pastor of the Crossroads Church in Cincinnati who was visiting the island Wednesday. “No other place is like this.”

Alcatraz draws 1.3 million visitors a year. It was ranked the No. 1 landmark in the country on Trip Advisor’s Travelers Choice award for the past two years. Boats run from San Francisco to Alcatraz every half hour, and they are always full.

The idea of a prison draws them, Tome thinks. “Everybody has a bit of a prison in their past, something they regret, something inside they may have done they keep inside them, like a personal prison.”

They see it in Alcatraz, stare in the cells, hear the stories, listen to the slam of the cell doors.

“And yet it is one of the most beautiful places you could go to,” said Mac Riley, a friend of Heidrich’s who came along to see the island.

It is kind of a morality play, too, the old story of the mighty fallen. Bigtime criminals were almost folk heroes in the 1920s and ’30s — John Dillinger, Capone, all the rest. “You have to think of how those men lived and what they had and how they came to this,” Riley said.

So it is not a surprise that Stewart would want to put its name back on the prison cellblock. Heidirch believes the ironworks, founded in 1862 in Cincinnati, is part of the island’s story. The company was so proud of its cell bars and locking mechanism that it made 24 bronze plaques, like manufacturer’s plates, and put them at the end of every tier and cellblock.

But after the prison closed, in 1963, all the old plaques disappeared. Some thought the last guards took them as souvenirs, or that they vanished during the Indian occupation in 1969. By the time the island was transferred to the National Park Service in 1972, they were all gone.

Eventually, the Park Service got Southern Folger Detention Co., which took over Stewart’s prison operation, to restore the cellblock locking mechanism. And Ranger Cantwell talked Stewart into reproducing and installing the bronze plaques as a finishing touch.

“We are honored to have our craftsmanship on display,” Heidrich said.

Photos by Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle Ranger John Cantwell demonstrates how the locking mechanism opened and closed cell doors at Alcatraz.

Andrew Lange of Stewart Iron Works, left and above, drills holes for screws in a replica of a plaque so that it can be installed where an original was once located.