Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  Everyone should visit Alcatraz if only to erase every romanticism surrounding it created by Hollywood. It wasn’t just a gritty cold penitentiary. It was a deadly, unsanitary and dirty building of tiny cages not fit for a zoo animal. It has gotten worse since it shut its doors in 1963. The water saturation corroding the structure which was a factor leading to its closure has continued its path of destruction and many of the buildings which were burned during the American Indian Movement’s Occupation of 1969-71 (notably the warden’s house) have been left in ruin and graffiti from the occupation is still visible at entry. Sea bird defecation is inescapable throughout the island. It is not easy to muster much sympathy for a man of the prison’s most notorious inmates. Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly and even Robert Stroud, the famous bird man, all had multiple murders in their records.   Hollywood has at least been honest about the brutality of many of these thugs, though The Bird...

  Very few pictures exist of San Francisco’s original Chinatown which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Hundreds of residents perished, many went unaccounted for. In the aftermath, when the mayor was in a race against time to rebuild the city, the proposal was to relocate the newly envisioned Chinatown. This was met with opposition from many local politicians who saw San Francisco’s Chinese community as a key to trade with Asia. This was, perhaps, the most persuasive argument Mayor Schmitz heard against relocation as the drive behind his fast-track rebuilding of the city was to reestablish San Francisco as a world-class port city and trade with Asia was one of its most lucrative assets. In a rare move, delegates from China became intricately involved in the proposals for the new Chinatown and, thanks in large part to their participation, Chinatown was rebuilt in its original quarters, a blessing to the residents who would have been forced to move as far as Hunters Point. Th...