San Francisco (Bay). USA, the city of San Francisco: description of the city, history, photo Island in the San Francisco Bay

In Russia (and in many other countries), the old military cities usually leave and collapse over time. And here in San Francisco, a military town located on an island Treasure islandwill soon turn into a real garden city  - A new eco-settlement right in the middle of the bay, in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Gate Bridge.

As a result, right in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, in the immediate vicinity of the city center, there will appear a self-sufficient garden city, the city of the future, combining all the best from the city and the village.

San Francisco Bay was not opened until 1769 and plays a special role in the life of the city. San Francisco was founded by the Spaniards only 7 years after the opening of the bay - in 1776 they built a fort at the Golden Gate Strait and founded a mission named after St. Francis. The city began to grow rapidly in the mid-19th century thanks to the California Gold Rush, and in 1848 it was renamed San Francisco. Since then, optimists, dreamers and romantics have been rushing here for a century and a half, striving for peace and the realization of some of their cherished dreams, rolling like waves of the famous Pacific fog. For a long time, San Francisco Bay, connected to the ocean by the Golden Gate Strait, is for many the beginning of a new life. Please note that the name Golden Gate is not accidental - when the gold rush began in California in 1848, this strait became for many a gateway to a new life. Someone was unlucky, but for someone this gate really became golden. And today, thousands of ships from many countries of the world go through the Golden Gate Strait to the bay of San Francisco and one of the largest ports on the Pacific coast of the United States.

1. Many pleasure boats set out for boat trips around San Francisco Bay. Our mini cruise will take place on this.

2. All morning the city and the bay were covered with a dense veil of fog, but in the afternoon the milk veil receded. Now the Golden Gate Bridge is perfectly visible from the Fisherman's Wharf of the city.

3. The fishing pier, the Coit tower and the city center are left behind ...

4. Illuminated by the bright sun, the harsh island of Alcatraz does not look so gloomy and impregnable.

5. Leaving the city berths, the ship leaves for the exit from the bay ...

6. The shores of the Golden Gate Strait, connecting San Francisco Bay with the ocean, are connected by a suspension bridge, one of the largest, most beautiful and famous in the world.

7. On the shore of the strait, near the bridge, is Fort Point, one of the most outstanding defensive structures erected on the Pacific coast. The fort was built in 1861, on the one hand, to protect San Francisco Bay from attack, and on the other, to protect ships carrying gold mined in California. By the way, in the thirties, during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, the fort was almost demolished.

8. We are heading under the Golden Gate Bridge ... This famous suspension bridge was opened in 1937 and until 1964 was the largest suspension bridge in the world. The length of the central span of the bridge is 1280 meters, the total length of the bridge is 1970 meters, the height of the pylons is 230 meters. Now it is the ninth bridge in the world along the span and of course - perhaps the most legendary and recognizable!

11. Having passed under the bridge, we leave briefly from the bay into the ocean and make a U-turn. The ocean near San Francisco is cold, cold currents pass here, strong winds often blow, fog comes into the city from here ... And the ocean waves are long, and barely leaving the bay, our boat begins to swing decently ...

12. Turn around and head back, again passing under the Golden Gate Bridge.

14. The Golden Gate, as always shrouded in a veil of fog, remains behind ...

16. Our boat goes to the island of Alcatraz, where from 1934 to 1963 there was a federal hard labor prison. But about this - separately ...

Alcatraz is a famous island located in the bay of San Francisco, California. Translated from the Spanish language Alcatraz (Alcatraz) means "pelican". The island also has another name - The Rock (The Rock), which he received thanks to the 1996 film by Michael Baye of the same name.

Alcatraz is among the top tourist attractions of this port city. Perhaps this place is so attractive due to its interesting, but rather gloomy history. Alcatraz is never empty. Travelers from all over the world come to the island to see firsthand the place "sung" in many films, television programs, literature and even music.

Island history

The first to enter the San Francisco Bay was a Spaniard named Juan Manuel de Ayala. This happened in 1775, and then he and his team compiled a map of the bay. One of the three islands, which today is called Yerba Buena, was named La Isla de los Alcatraces. Perhaps it meant "Pelican Island", but this is only an assumption. The fact is that nearby birds of this species were not found at all.

Later, in 1828, a geographer from England Frederick Beachy made a mistake by transferring the names of islands from Spanish maps. Thus, the name Island Alcatrazes received a neighboring island. Subsequently, the decision of the US Coast Guard topographic service, the name was reduced to what we know today - Alcatraz.

The Gold Rush caused a series of changes in the island. For example, in 1853 a lighthouse was installed on Alcatraz, and three years later - a bell, which was used in fog. Then the need arose to protect the bay. For this, in 1850 the construction of the fort with more than 110 long-range guns was begun.

Prisons in Alcatraz

Due to its location, the island was in real natural isolation. Icy water, the middle of the bay and strong sea currents were the reasons that pushed the US army to look at Alcatraz from a new perspective. This place was ideal for keeping prisoners of war, and from 1861 to 1898 their number increased to 450 people.

In 1934, the Ministry of Defense decided to close the prison - it took too much money to maintain it.

However, the story of prisons on the island did not end there. The Great Depression spawned a new wave of crime, and the government decided to reopen Alcatraz, this time as a federal prison. Now here are dangerous criminals. Later, reconstruction was made, and the prison turned into an impregnable place with containers for tear gas in the dining room and other ways to “tame” the prisoners.

Interestingly, the courts did not sentence to serving a term in Alcatraz. Prisoners who managed to “distinguish themselves” in their former place fell into the walls of a world-famous prison. So the myth that Alcatraz was completely filled with the most dangerous criminals is not entirely true - those who showed willfulness and disobedience also visited here. Of course, the famous and dangerous criminals also managed to visit Alcatraz - which is the name of Al Capone or Machine Gun Kelly.

Alcatraz today

Today, the prison has long been disbanded, and the whole island is a museum. You can get into it by ferry from pier number 33 in San Francisco.

Tours to Alcatraz

Departure time: 8:45, 9:10, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, 12:00, 12:30, 13:05, 13:35.

Tour price: for adults - $ 46.35; for children - $ 31.50.

Night tour: 3:50, 4:45.

Price: for adults - $ 53.50; for children - $ 35.05.

Do not miss the chance to see the famous Alcatraz with your own eyes, but because if you are in San Francisco, visit this famous island. In this city you can see a lot of interesting things, you should definitely visit the beloved Pier 39, which was once the house of fur seals.

Alcatraz on a map of San Francisco

Alcatraz is a famous island located in the bay of San Francisco, California. Translated from the Spanish language Alcatraz (Alcatraz) means "pelican". The island also has another name - The Rock (The Rock), which he received thanks to the 1996 film by Michael Baye of the same name.

Alcatraz is among the top tourist attractions of this city ... "/\u003e

In 1775, a Spanish explorer, Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala, mapped a small island, which he named Isla de Las Alcatraces - Pelican Island, due to the huge population of these birds nesting here. He could not have imagined that this island would go down in history as the worst prison in the United States. Alcatraz is familiar to many thanks to the films “Escape from Alcatraz” with Clint Eastwood and “The Rock” with Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, but not everyone knows that the island has a very rich and amazing history.

From Pelican Island to Military Prison

1848 year. Near the town of San Francisco, gold was found. The news of this find quickly flew all over the country, and thousands of people poured into California. For several years, the population of San Francisco has increased from 300 to 300 thousand. Prospectors arrived both by land and by sea. Suddenly, the city was in the center of attention of the whole world. The young state of California needed protection from the sea, and the choice fell on the island of Alcatraz. It turned out to be an ideal place - just one mile from the city, from here all the ships trying to land in the harbor of San Francisco were perfectly visible. In 1854, the first defensive structures were built here and 11 guns were installed (subsequently there will be more than a hundred). From that time began the story of Alcatraz, the most fortified fort west of the Mississippi River, as they said then. In general, in the entire history of Alcatraz, it has been a fort, a fortress, and a prison for war criminals, but the most dramatic and interesting events nevertheless occurred in the 20th century.

The most legendary prison in the USA

America of the 30s. The rampant crime, newspapers are full of messages about the next gangster showdown, kidnapping, raids on banks. The police are powerless, and what can we talk about if the gangsters are much better armed and organized, and sometimes the police in small towns sometimes don’t have enough weapons for everyone. At the same time, Alcatraz military prison is living out its last days. The money allocated from the budget is sorely lacking; food and water have to be delivered here from San Francisco, and this is an extra expense. The military really decided to close Alcatraz, as they received an offer from the Ministry of Justice to transfer the prison to them. The fact is that the police and the FBI have long been looking for a place where they could arrange a prison completely isolated from the outside world, and Alcatraz was ideally suited for these purposes. On the one hand, it is located next to a large city, it is clearly visible from everywhere and it can serve as a warning for possible criminals, and on the other hand, it is completely isolated, it is impossible to approach it imperceptibly and to escape from it is almost impossible. So the fortress during the Civil War turned into the most guarded and impregnable prison for especially dangerous criminals. Before the "guests" began to arrive here, some changes were made here: new locks were installed, the lattices on the cameras were replaced and strengthened, special galleries were made for the armed guards (guards walked along the corridor between the cameras without keys and weapons to exclude the possibility of an attack), special metal detectors and some other innovations were delivered. In August 1934, Alcatraz was fully prepared to receive "guests". The new prison was supposed to contain the most dangerous, most "famous" criminals. It was not intended to re-educate them here - it was useless; in prison, in the literal sense of the word, they were to serve their sentences. The prisoners here had the right to only four things - food, clothes, a roof over their heads and medical assistance. Everything else was called privilege, and they had to be earned by exemplary behavior and obedience. At the same time, the slightest violation of the regime was strictly punished: from deprivation of privileges to placement in a terrible "dark cell" - a sort of concrete well in which it was very cold, crowded and there was no light at all. A prisoner could be kept here for several days and several months, depending on the severity of the misconduct. Today, visitors to Alcatraz can see these stone bags with their own eyes and try to imagine how people could exist there. From only one kind of goosebumps run: It is not for nothing that the prisoners nicknamed Alcatraz - Hellcatraz, from the English word hell - hell.

At first, prisoners were even forbidden to talk, an exception was made only during meals or on a walk (if it was allowed). Visitors, parcels and mail were an incredible privilege, and the prisoners received letters retyped on a typewriter to exclude the possibility of transmitting encrypted messages. And the biggest privilege was work, it was especially obedient to it.

But the most amazing thing is that, along with all these restrictions, the prisoners had a luxurious library at their disposal, they were given out cigarettes in excess (to avoid tobacco speculation), showed new films, there was always plenty of hot water, they fed tasty and varied. And today, on the wall of the prison canteen, a menu is posted - frankly, not a very "prison" one.

But who was sitting here? For whom was such a prison arranged?

Al Capone, Kelly Machine Gun and other inhabitants

In fact, despite numerous legends, not so many "celebrities" have visited Alcatraz. Of the 1,545 people who served their sentences, only a few dozen, or even less, were known throughout the country. And, of course, one of the most famous was Al (Alphonse) Capone, a man with a scar, although he spent only four and a half years in this prison. The police hunted him for a very long time, but could not take him red-handed, and only a simple accountant could do it. Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion! At first he was in Atlanta, but soon his "arms comrades" settled around the prison, and he calmly led his group directly from the prison. Here he acquired a whole army of servants from prisoners, bribed the prison authorities, and visitors constantly came to him: In a word, “he sat and did not bother” until he was in Alcatraz, where he was one of the first to be transferred.

Another Alcatraz legend is George Kelly the Machine Gun. He received his nickname because he always used a machine gun when robbing banks. On his conscience were bootlegging, murders, bank robberies, and even the abduction of oil tycoon from Oklahoma. Kelly-machine gun received a life sentence and spent 17 years in Alcatraz, after which he was transferred to another prison for health reasons, where he soon died.

You can name a few more names: Alvin Karpis - partner of the famous Ma Baker, whom Edgar Hoover called "the enemy of society number one", and Robert Stroud, nicknamed Ornithologist, who became especially famous after the release of the film "Bird Man from Alcatraz".

In 1909, Stroud sat behind the robbery. But while he was serving his sentence in a Washington prison, he attacked a cellmate. He was transferred to a Kansas prison. But in 1916 he killed a guard there, for which Stroud was sentenced to death. True, then the then president, Wilson, at the request of Stroud's mother, replaced the execution with a life sentence. In 1942 he was transferred to Alcatraz. There he began to study the birds, which he was interested in since childhood, and even wrote two books on canaries and diseases common to them. Seeing such a lively scientific interest, the prison administration allowed Stroud to study birds in kind. But Stroud didn’t change himself, and often forbidden objects were found in birdcages. In Alcatraz, he spent only 17 years - 6 years in Block D and 11 years in a prison hospital. In 1959, he was sent to the federal criminals medical center in Springfield, Missouri, where he died in 1963. Photos of the most famous guests today can be seen on the walls in Alcatraz, and at the same time find out their stories.

Prison routine

So far, such famous criminals as Al Capone, George Machine Gun Kelly (enemy of the state N1), and Arthur Doc Barker spent time in Alcatraz, most of the 1,576 prisoners who were sitting there at different times were not famous gangsters. Nevertheless, they were convicts who refused to comply with the rules established in other federal prisons, that is, they were especially dangerous and prone to escape.

In Alcatraz, convicts had 4 firm rights: food, clothing, a roof over their heads and medical care. The prisoner must earn all the rest for himself. Working prisoners received privileges related to the regime of visits, visits to the prison library and the ability to relax, engage in drawing or music.

Escape from Alcatraz

Perhaps the most interesting in Alcatraz is the stories of attempts to escape from "American Siberia", as this prison was also called. They say that only 36 prisoners tried to escape, but it seems that not a single escape was successful. The fact is that there is ice water in the bay and there is a very strong current, so, although it’s close to San Francisco, the chances of reaching the shore are almost zero, and the approach of the boats was strictly forbidden - shooting started immediately. And further. There was a rumor among the prisoners that there were a lot of cannibal sharks around the island that would tear to pieces anybody who ended up in the water. They even talked about a shark named Bruce, which the guards allegedly specially fed, so that it would always be "at a military post". Of course, there were no man-eating sharks and there are not, and there are only leopard sharks that do not attack people, but the legend worked, and there were not very many who wanted to get sharks for lunch. It is authentically known that only one prisoner named John Scott managed to swim to the shore. It was in 1962. But he was so exhausted and exhausted after the swim that he collapsed without strength on the shore, where two boys found him. They decided that the man was trying to commit suicide by throwing himself from the Golden Gate Bridge, and called for help from the police, who immediately identified the fugitive and returned him back to Alcatraz. But the most famous and prepared was the escape of two Anglin brothers and their accomplice Morris, which served as the basis for Clint Eastwood's famous film “Escape from Alcatraz”. Using spoons secretly taken out of the dining room, they made a passage in the wall and fled through the ventilation shafts. But the most remarkable thing is that they made their "heads" from cement, glue, paint and hair stolen from the hairdresser and laid them on pillows so that the guard noticed their absence only in the morning during the roll call. It is still unknown how this escape ended - for the past 38 years, the runaways haven’t been announced anywhere, but there is no reliable evidence of their death either: And the “heads” can be seen in their cells in Alcatraz - they are actually made very skillfully .

Closing

On March 21, 1962, Alcatraz Prison was closed. Officially, it is believed that this decision was made due to the increasing high cost of maintaining criminals on the island. The last 27 prisoners left Alcatraz forever. But the story did not end there. In the early 70s, dramatic events occurred here when the island was captured by the Indians, demanding that it be surrendered to create here "Indian territory" with a university, a spiritual center, a museum, etc. Even a proposal was put forward to buy it from the authorities for $ 24 - the cost of another island, which 300 years earlier, white people bought from the Indians (meaning the island of Manhattan). For a long 19 months, the Indians held the island, but in the end they surrendered and left it. And the fate of Alcatraz was still unclear. Many ideas have been put forward, including proposals for creating a cattery for homeless cats and dogs, setting up a casino, etc.

For further use of the prison, restoration work worth a total of 3-5 million dollars was required. However, these figures did not include the daily maintenance of prisoners - and the prisoners of Alcatraz cost the budget three times more than any other federal prison. For example, in 1959 the daily allowance of the Skala prisoner cost $ 10.10 versus $ 3 in Atlanta prison. The high cost was due to the fact that literally everything — food, fuel — had to be delivered from the mainland. The island did not even have its own drinking water, and about a million gallons of water had to be delivered to Alcatraz every week.

In 1972, Congress approved the creation of the Golden Gate National Park, and Alcatraz was among the park sites. In 1973, the Rock was open to the public and became one of the most attractive places in the National Park - annually about a million tourists visit Alcatraz.