A sign hanging below the razor wire admonishes inmates: Do not feed the birds.
The pigeons flitting around the exercise yard of the old penitentiary still might have found a few scraps in the past, but not on Thursday morning -- and perhaps never again.
The "Big Yard" at State Correctional Institution Pittsburgh and its honeycomb of more than 1,100 cells were deserted. After 123 years, the state's oldest prison, better known as Western State Penitentiary, was "mothballed" yesterday.
The last bus departed at 8:33 a.m., taking the last 41 inmates to new cells at SCI Forest in Forest County.
On Wednesday, a bus had carried 10 inmates to a different state prison, SCI Rockview in Central Pennsylvania.
"They were old-timers, and they were really depressed," said G.E. Semian, a guard at the North Side prison for 16 years. "This was their home, and they were reluctant to leave. You could see it in their eyes."
Semian will transfer to a new state prison in Fayette County next week.
Prison officials phased the shutdown over the past year. Many of the 1,800 inmates who once were held there already had been transferred to SCI Fayette. All but about 30 of 800 employees also had been transferred or taken other jobs.
"There is a lot of history here. It's the end of an era," William S. Stickman, deputy secretary of corrections for the state Department of Corrections, said at a news briefing in the prison's lobby.
The inmates' departure marked the closing of the storied Western Pen, a foreboding structure near the Ohio River in the North Side's Woods Run neighborhood.
The prison has a troubled history, including the killing of four corrections officers by inmates, periodic flooding, fires, tunnel escapes and a 1953 riot during which more than 1,000 prisoners took several guards hostage and burned part of the license plate factory.
A brief ceremony culminated that history yesterday, when Stickman removed plaques from the lobby that commemorated the slain guards. He said the plaques and other prison memorabilia eventually will be placed in a planned Department of Corrections museum.
The event elicited bittersweet comments from a handful of prison officials, former workers and current employees spending their last day on the job at Western Pen, and relatives of guard Cliff Grogan Sr., who was stabbed to death by an inmate on Nov. 12, 1965.
"He died doing his job -- what he liked doing," said daughter Linda Grogan, 54, of Bellevue. "He's a hero to me."
Tonya Edwards, the prison's mailroom supervisor, was crushed.
"My whole adult life, I've been with these people here," said Edwards, 38, of Verona. "I get all misty talking about it."
Her state job of 17 years ends this week. Edwards said she was offered a job at the new SCI Forest, but she declined because the facility is "a 2 1/2-hour drive, and that's too far."
Former Steelers running back Jack "the Hydroplane" Deloplaine was working through the last day of a 21-year career at the prison, where he was a labor foreman. He said the state made a mistake closing the lockup.
"It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. They took 800 jobs out of a city that's going bankrupt," said Deloplaine, who played for the Steelers in 1976-79.
Although employees, union representatives and some local officials lobbied against closing the lockup, the state decided it was necessary to save money and improve standards. Newer prisons are built for more efficient and secure operations, officials said.
Western Pen will be mothballed for three years, in case it is needed again to house inmates. After that, it's future is uncertain.
Although originally built for single-cell incarceration of 1,290 inmates, the prison's population soared to about 2,200 during the 1980s, causing drastic overcrowding and prompting a federal lawsuit.
Now-Senior U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill Jr. declared conditions at the facility unsafe and unconstitutional. The judge's order prompted the state to spend more than $100 million on improvements, including a new hospital.
Touted as the first prison in the United States with indoor plumbing when it opened in 1882, the prison was described as outmoded and inadequate by 1910 in a letter its warden sent to the governor. That warden complained the prison was "subject to floods" from the nearby Ohio.
The river flooded the prison just two years after it opened. It has flooded five times since then, most recently in 1996.
It also has a history of escapes and escape attempts. One of the most daring occurred on Jan. 8, 1997, when six inmates tunneled to freedom beneath Western Pen's 40-foot sandstone walls. The escapees were caught in Texas within two weeks.
Derrick Herring, 31, a dietary aide, was just settling in to his new home on Geyer Avenue when the infamous jailbreak took place.
"It was a big concern at the time, because my kids walked to school," Herring said. "There was a lot of law enforcement riding around, but I figured they had already high-tailed it from here."
Sitting in Mr. Jack's bar on McClure Avenue, retired SCI guard Paul Trunick, 56, of Brighton Heights, recalled growing up in the neighborhood when at least two inmates drowned in an escape attempt in the 1950s by going through the sewer system.
"They thought they'd be home free if they got to the river, but what they didn't realize was that there was a big grate that they couldn't get through," Trunick said.
Annie Beining, 64, who grew up in the surrounding neighborhood, then raised her own family there, recalls her father referring to the prison as "The Big House."
"But there really weren't any problems," Beining said. "The prisoners used to watch us when I would take my kids down to the river to fish."
Key dates at SCI Pittsburgh
1882 -- The first completed housing unit, South Block, gets first inmates
1889 -- Original prison construction, costing taxpayers $2 million, completed
1900 -- First attempts at escape tunnel
1910 -- Warden recommends moving the prison to less flood-prone site
1924 -- Deputy warden John A. Pieper and Sgt. John T. Coax killed by inmates
1936 -- Severe flood, with nearly 15 feet of water in the cell blocks
1934 -- Hospital added
1939 -- Power plant added
1941 -- Sewage disposal plant added
1944 -- Governor's committee finds the prison in need of major repair and recommends only short-term continued use
1948 -- Three inmates tunnel out
1952 -- Ten inmates escape using a 70-foot ladder
1953 -- Prisoners riot, taking six guards hostage and burning part of the facility
1965 -- Guard Cliff Grogan killed by inmate
1973 -- Corrections Capt. Walter Peterson killed by inmates
1984 -- Construction begins on five-phase master plan to renovate SCI Pittsburgh
1989 -- Federal judge declares overcrowding unconstitutional
1994 -- New hospital finished
1996 -- Prison floods for at least the fifth time in the 20th century
1997 -- Six inmates escape through tunnel; federal lawsuit resolved after more than $100 million in improvements; Legislature approves $135 million for new prison for southwestern Pennsylvania
2003 -- New prison with capacity for 1,914 inmates opens in Luzerne, Fayette County. Most of SCI Pittsburgh's inmates and employees transferred there.
2005 -- Last inmates are transferred out of SCI Pittsburgh
SCI Pittsburgh by the numbers:
