HSPV 7010

HSPV 7010: Eastern State Penitentiary

Cellblock 3 is the historic hospital cellblock in Eastern State Penitentiary - a National Historic Landmark located in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood on the corner of 22nd Street and Fairmount Avenue. Eastern State Penitentiary was the world’s first true penitentiary, designed to inspire penitence in prisoners. It opened in 1829 and officially closed in 1971. Despite the city’s several attempts to sell the site, it remained in a state of abandonment until 1988, when the Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force began conducting limited tours of the site.

Stabilization and preservation projects began three years later, followed by daily tour schedules and the eventual formation of the managing nonprofit - Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Inc. (ESPHS), in 1997. Although their original mission was to preserve the historic site and provide tours, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site has evolved into an organization with the goal to interpret the legacy of American criminal justice reform, from the nation’s founding to the present day, within the long-abandoned cellblocks of the nation’s most historic prison.
In the fall of 2022, a group of students from the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania studied Cellblock 3 to develop a preservation plan for future interventions and programming. They followed a values-centered planning approach with the objective to research Cellblock 3’s history, assess its historic fabric, analyze its contexts, and engage with stakeholders. This approach was used in order to determine the physical evolution of Cellblock 3, which guides the interpretation of social ideologies around prison reform and medicine from the late 19th century to 1971.

HSPV 7010: Eastern State Penitentiary

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Faculty