February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Now there is talk of a museum that will actually extend inside the walls of an institution that has hosted innumerable Irish-Americans, both as employees and inmates.
The museum, according to studies, would provide a boost to the economy of the lower Hudson Valley. But some are concerned that a museum’s inevitable treatment of the death penalty would veer toward the sensational and voyeuristic.
The debate will take sharper form should New York State decide to proceed with the museum plan. It will also occur against the backdrop of a prison facility that is still fully operational.
Sing Sing’s memorable name once matched that of the surrounding village and is a variation on the name of a native American tribe that once lived in the area. The village of Sing Sing, wanting to distinguish itself from its penal neighbor, changed its name to Ossining at the beginning of the 20th century.
Sing Sing today holds roughly 2,000 prisoners in separate maximum- and medium-security facilities overlooking the Hudson River.
That’s 2,000 stories atop hundreds of thousands that have gone before. The place drips with memories. And it echoes to a host of Irish names.
One is that of Warden Thomas McCormick, who, in 1914, decided that the playing of baseball would be beneficial to the prison’s population.
In later years the New York Yankees and New York Giants would pitch and bat on Sing Sing’s field of broken dreams and Babe Ruth would hit home runs for his captive fans.
Warden James Clancy was another Irish-American with a progressive streak. He believed in the virtues of fresh air and changed the rules to allow prisoners to spend part of Sunday morning in the yard rather than locked up in their cells.
Those familiar with the Clint Eastwood movie “Escape From Alcatraz” will know that Eastwood’s character uses a dummy of himself to buy time as he escapes. This part of the movie’s plot replicates the escape plan of more than one Sing Sing inmate.
One of them was John McAllister, who made his move for freedom in the summer of 1919.
McAllister, a burglar who was also a talented artist, used hair, old clothing, bread dough and paint to create a dummy of himself that was left on his cell bed while he made good his escape.
A Sing Sing museum, should one go ahead, will point to the varied roles that inmates and overseers such as these played in making the prison not just famous and infamous, but also in turning it from a 19th century penal colony into a penitentiary in which the inhabitants could look to years of incarceration that promised more than just punishment.
The main part of the proposed museum would be housed in an old power plant that lies just outside the present day walls of the prison, a few minutes’ walk from the Ossining train station.
But, according to Westchester County Planning Commissioner Jerry Mulligan, the museum would also take visitors over the wall of the medium security Tappan facility and into the area of the prison’s first cellblock, which still has its walls and gable ends, though its roof was destroyed by fire in 1984.
“Westchester County participated in a study in 2000 that culminated in two reports, one dealing with design of a museum and the other with marketing it,” Mulligan said.
When the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks took place, money that might have been funneled into the museum project ended up going elsewhere, he said.
But, according to Mulligan, the museum plan is now being revived and is being strongly promoted by regional political leaders, including Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano.
“The museum would be centered on the old power plant and would include a covered walkway going over the wall into the original 1825 cellblock,” Mulligan said.
The museum, he said, would focus on the history of the penal system as it was played out in Sing Sing, which has, he added, its own unique place in the nation’s culture, music and literature.
Mulligan said that museum boosters were keenly aware of the sensitivities surrounding what would make up a core part of the museum: an exhibit highlighting Sing Sing’s role as a place of execution.
Between 1891 and 1963, 614 men and women died in Sing Sing’s electric chair, nicknamed — to the amusement of some and the horror of others — “Old Sparky.” After 1914, Sing Sing’s “Death House” was the sole death row in New York State’s prison system.
The real bird man
Two Guns Crowley met his end in Sing Sing’s chair. Crowley was just 19 when he faced death for the murder of a police officer. Such was Crowley’s violent reaction to incarceration — he would attack guards and set fires in his cell — that he was placed in a special isolation cell on death row.
A starling managed to fly into his cell one day and Crowley fed the bird. The bird kept returning and Crowley agreed to behave if he could have the bird as a come-and-go pet. Prison authorities agreed and Crowley calmed down. The relationship between Crowley and his winged friend ended with Crowley’s execution in 1932.
If Crowley was a Sing Sing bird man, he was just one of many during the years in which the prison was run by Warden Lewis Lawes, whose term of office ran from 1920 to 1941 and who is credited with being Sing Sing’s most progressive penal reformer.
During this period, prisoners were encouraged to keep birds as pets and a birdhouse was even built to accommodate exotic species.
But aviaries and rose gardens — the work of Sing Sing’s so-called “Rose Man,” Charles Chapin, a newspaper editor convicted of murder — could never fully distract from the fact that people were being put to death on a regular basis in close proximity to these more obvious manifestations of enlightened penology.
Electric chair controversy
Arguably the most controversial executions were carried out in 1953 when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were put to death in the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
Their son Robert Meeropol is a campaigner to this day against capital punishment.
Meeropol has strong reservations about a Sing Sing museum because he thinks it more likely than not that the exhibit on the death penalty will be more to do with attracting people than educating them.
“I can see an exhibit on the electric chair presented in the same way as the exhibits at Auschwitz; if not, I would oppose it,” Meeropol said recently.
The facts behind the death penalty, Meeropol said, pointed to an overwhelming majority of people on Sing Sing’s death row as being poor and non-white.
He said that that at this point he remained skeptical and did not feel that the museum’s boosters would harbor sensibilities on the death penalty matching his own, and beyond this his particular sensibilities regarding the execution of his parents.
“It depends on how it is done, and whether or not it’s an objective presentation of the facts with regard to the death penalty,” he said. “If it is, and if gives at least gives both sides of the story, it could be useful. But I rather doubt that those pushing this idea are going to present this exhibit in such a manner.”
Westchester County’s Jerry Mulligan said that the museum’s proponents were not insensitive to the deep antipathy that many people feel toward the death penalty and beyond this an exhibit featuring Sing Sing’s first rank role in capital punishment.
A death penalty exhibit at Sing Sing would neither be morbid nor sensationalized, he said.
“It would be of a much different orientation, one that would focus on the history of prison reform,” Mulligan said.
He said that the design of the museum would allow visitors to bypass the death row exhibit if they found it unacceptable.
The Larkin visit
Whatever the eventual nature of a death penalty component in the museum, there will be acknowledgement of Irish-American and Irish presence behind the walls throughout the prison’s history.
One of the most famous guests of the state in Sing Sing was the Irish labor leader James Larkin, who spent six years campaigning for labor causes in the U.S. until he was convicted by a New York court in 1920 for “Criminal Anarchy.”
Larkin was sentenced on May 3 and taken to Sing Sing that same day. The receiving blotter described Larkin as a 42-year-old man, 6-foot-1 and 191 pounds. He was in fact several inches taller.
It mentioned that Larkin had previously served a sentence of seven months in Dublin for no less than “treason and sedition.”
According to the blotter, Larkin’s habits were “moderate.” He was employed as a “secretary,” this as opposed to being, as the blotter described it, “idle.”
Larkin settled into his new home, which was, luckily for him and his fellow inmates, now under the control of Warden Lawes.
From time to time Larkin had visitors. One was Charlie Chaplin, who described the older cell blocks in Sing Sing as “grimly medieval.”
Chaplin met Larkin as he was working in the prison shoe factory. He was accompanied by the writer Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde’s biographer.
Chaplin later recalled that Harris had been depressed to see a flamboyant character like Larkin subdued by the enforced discipline of a prison.
On his first St. Patrick’s Day behind bars, Larkin would be given his chance to break free from such rigors, if only for a few moments.
He was asked by some of the guards to relate the story of St. Patrick to all his fellow prisoners.
This Larkin did in a straightforward way until he reached the point of the tale where St. Patrick, as legend had it, expelled the snakes from Ireland.
Larkin posed the question as to where all the snakes had gone to, and then he answered it himself.
“They came to America to become politicians, policemen and prison guards,” he roared.
There was pandemonium. The prisoners erupted into loud cheering and applause. Larkin’s career as a Sing Sing orator and storyteller ended there and then.
Larkin was to spend one more St. Patrick’s Day in Sing Sing. He was no doubt kept busy in the shoe factory.
In early 1923, Gov. Al Smith pardoned Larkin, not because he believed in the Irishman’s politics, but because he thought it wrong that Larkin should be in prison for agitating for his political beliefs.
Larkin was deported to Ireland in April 1923. Shortly afterward, he was elected to the new Irish parliament.
He died in 1947, true to his beliefs to the last and perhaps smiling at the memory of a St. Patrick’s Day in Sing Sing when the inmates were given a chance to laugh together in a place where lightness of being was as rare as a view over the walls.