Elmira, NY – Traveling with Twain

Twain and the Elmira Correctional Facility

Dan Tham — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:24:13 +0000

Follow our tour of the Elmira Correctional Facility with Superintendent Paul Chappius and Deputy Superintendent Steve Wenderlich. During his Elmira years, Twain tested his lectures on prisoners.

Video by Dan

Elmira Correctional Facility advocates “relaxed control” of inmates

Alyssa Karas — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:33:06 +0000

On a sunny day, the placement of the Elmira Correctional Facility seems inappropriate for a maximum security prison. If you make it to the top of several very steep flights of stairs, you’re rewarded with several views; the first being the town of Elmira and the picturesque Finger Lakes region, brilliant in its fall foliage.

The second is a crudely constructed sculpture of two naked men.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh boy, the jail with the two naked guys out front,” Elmira Correctional Facility Superintendent Paul Chappius says with a sigh. That was his first reaction when he found out he would be transferred to Elmira from Attica, a notoriously rough prison in New York.

This morning we’re visiting Chappius, who began his tenure as Elmira Correctional Facility’s top dog only a month ago. He’s so new that his name is vacant from the signage on the grounds outside.

Mark Twain, actually, is the reason we’re at the Elmira prison in the first place. He tried out a few of his lectures on the inmates before the building was a maximum security prison.

Chappius quips that it must have been a “captive audience.”

Although Chappius is new, the prison has quite a history. The facility, which was originally a mere reformatory, opened in 1876. In older pictures it looks like a castle or a mansion. But in 2003 two inmates managed to get onto the roof, tie bed linens together, climb down and escape. The media snapped an embarrassing photo of the prison, sheets still hanging from the roof. After that barbed wire and razor ribbon went up everywhere. The outside of the building looks more prison-like these days, spiky and imposing.

The inside, however, is more inviting than we expected. The history of the place and its thick layers of paint make it accidentally charming when you’re on the right side of the prison bars. The guards are chummy with one another but they also interact with the inmates in positive ways, leading to what leadership calls “relaxed control” and a clean, organized facility.

Chappius welcomes us into his office, which is filled with New York Yankees’ paraphernalia. The Yankees are big around here, and their emblem is painted on walls, doors and floors. Chappius is a friendly man with sandy hair and a matching mustache, but we don’t want to push his good will by bringing up the Yankees’ recent loss.

He calls Stephen J. Wenderlich, deputy superintendent of security, to join us and fill in some of the details. Chappius has been here a month, Wenderlich, 12 years. He strides over from his office, and a momentary air of formality descends upon the room.

Wenderlich looks official in a head-to-toe gray uniform. He uses a perpetual “yes, sir” or “no, sir” and dutifully supports all of the superintendent’s statements. Soon enough, though, a sly smile breaks through Wenderlich’s boyish face. Dan, Loren and I aren’t sure how to react when he eventually starts making jokes.

Deputy Superintendent of Security Steve Wenderlich

Wenderlich is “the numbers guy,” Chappius says. Wenderlich explains that Elmira holds approximately 1,800 inmates, which include prisoners in the maximum security facility and the reception center. Security staff here is about 600.

“The facility is like a city,” Wenderlich says. “Everything you find in the city of Elmira, you find in the correctional facility of Elmira. There’s doctors, electricians, plumbers.”

The biggest issue the correctional facility tries to address—in a change from recent years—is the mental health of the prisoners.

“You can imagine, prison is a tough environment anyway,” Wenderlich says. “(Prisoners) come with their backgrounds, and then you put them all together and say, ‘Now get along.’”

Wenderlich and Chappius remember when a prisoner’s mental health status was no consideration at all.

“Old-school prison,” as Wenderlich calls it. “It was just ‘Keep ‘em in, don’t let ‘em out.’”

These days a prisoner’s mental health is evaluated before almost anything can happen, be it disciplinary action or housing placement.

“Ten years ago, if you told an inmate to do something and he didn’t do something, you took action, and it was usually physical,” Wenderlich says.

Of course staff members still grapple with stereotypical issues of running a prison, specifically drugs and gangs. Just the other day, Chappius says, a mother and sister smuggled in 23 grams of marijuana. Even a grandmother was caught once.

Gangs, and criminal organizations in prisons, are a correctional officer’s worst nightmare, Chappius says.

“We know there are gangs,” he says. “We know they are there but we do not acknowledge them. We do not empower them.” He vaguely alludes to the policies of other states, in which officials negotiate with prison gang leaders, and expresses his distaste.

On the other hand, Wenderlich eagerly expresses approval for Chappius’ policies in place in Elmira.

Chappius’ first motto—”Helplessness and hopelessness are detrimental”—is connected to his second,“walking and talking.” Walking and talking is very straightforward. It means guards get on the floor with the inmates and engage in human interaction.

“My wife says, ‘Well, you don’t go back there, do ya?’” Wenderlich says, affecting a tone to mimic his wife’s worry. “I say, ‘Oh yeah, honey, I do,” he says excitedly. Even the higher-ups are expected to interact with inmates in the prison setting.

Before our guided tour, Chappius says most people expect to see inmates in their cells, or officers standing over inmates.

“You’re going to see a clean, organized facility,” Wenderlich told us. “You won’t feel the tension in the air. It’s kind of a relaxed control.”

The two escort us past the security checkpoint outside of their sterile offices and into the prison, and we prepare to see this “relaxed control” that they had been talking about.

There’s a board filled with green and red metal tags hanging on pegs. Wenderlich and Chappius flip their tags over. In case of emergency, staff needs to know who’s in and who’s out, who’s green and who’s red. The action has an ominous feeling about it, reminding us that the situation can change as easily as they flip the tags over.

We enter the E Block, which can hold 148 prisoners when it’s full. The walls and bars are white and sky blue, with cerulean accents. The way the light filters in from the window and the cells stretch up to the ceiling, it’s sort of like being underwater.

Almost immediately Chappius sees a sheet tied to the bars across an inmate’s cell, blocking the inside from view. He strides over and forcefully knocks it down. He gives the prisoner a sharp verbal reprimand. It’s a little scary.

Chappius never intended to get into the prison business. In fact, he downright wanted to avoid it. He meant to be a dairy farmer with his father.

His mother was a switchboard operator at the local prison. “I had told her there was no way I would ever be a damn prison guard,” Chappius says.

Superintendent Paul Chappius

On the sly, she forged his signature and signed Chappius up to take the prison guard test. You can imagine his surprise when he received something in the mail. He still wasn’t going to take the test. But the night before, “everything that could possibly go wrong on a dairy farm went wrong on a dairy farm.”

He got up the next morning and took the test. He scored a 98.

Loren asks Chappius when he changed his mind.

“When I was standing knee deep in cow manure,” he says.

We pass through the historic D Block, which was built in 1876. There are several levels of cells, and they face one another across a large open space.

In the B Block, Chappius pauses in front of another cell. “You all right?” he asks its inmate softly.

“A little cold,” the inmate replies. Chappius expresses his sincere concern.

It’s cold in the prison, despite the Indian summer weather. But once the heat’s on, it’s on. With 80-degree weather coming this weekend, the prisoners would roast, he says.

All throughout our prison tour, we see evidence of the “walking and talking” Chappius described. He and Wenderlich address prisoners by name, ask them how they are doing and tell them they’ll try to get them home.

We pass rows and rows of cells. Inmates sit on their beds and read or write. Some have TVs.

“Each block has its own personality,” Chappius says. “They take a lot of pride in what they do and how it looks.” Some of the prisoners’ paintings on the walls are quite elaborate. Aside from the pervasive Yankees logo, there are also nature and nautical scenes.

Our only rule today is that we can’t take photos of inmates, and this leads to entire blocks being cleared out once or twice on our behalf.

Wenderlich takes us inside a momentarily vacant cell in the historic D Block. Wenderlich is eager to point out photo opportunities. He’s a very enthusiastic man (also evidenced by the numerous comments he has left on our website, asking us if we enjoyed the tour).

The cell is so small that photographing the space is a challenge. There’s a tiny sink and a toilet. Green sweats are hanging on a clothes line against the side of the cell. A Rolling Stone cover is taped to the wall, along with a few glossy pages from a men’s magazine featuring women blowing kisses. Those are the pictures you can see from the outside. The really raunchy, eye-poppingly pornographic photos have to be on the opposite wall, which isn’t visible from the corridor. There are considerably more of these.

In a large, open room there’s a group of Rastafarians, many with long dreadlocks, sitting at tables and standing around, talking. They’re holding a special religious event.

“They get to do what Rastafarians do,” Chappius says. “Except smoke,” he laughs.

We pass through the mess hall, and the silver tables and benches are gleaming. A glass office overlooks the large room. Just as we’re getting a bit too comfortable, Chappius subtly reminds us where we are. He tells us officers can deploy different doses of “chemical agent” if necessary. “Also known as tear gas,” he adds.

The scullery behind the mess hall is bustling with activity. Inmates wash dishes and do other tasks. (“They’re going about their jobs,” Wenderlich says. “Just like you’d see in a college cafeteria kitchen.”)

Outside of the prison, there’s a recycling center, which sits in front of six units used for conjugal visits. Nearby, it looks like the Main Street of a city. Rows of brick buildings used for inmate classes face one another.

The Fieldhouse is the main attraction. It’s used for recreation. Inmates get a minimum of one hour of recreation a day, but most get many more. When we arrive, it’s eerily empty. There are basketball courts, phones and four TVs. There’s something for everyone: one TV is used for sports, one is used for movies, another runs BET and the last is for a Hispanic channel, Wenderlich says.

Once again, Chappius draws our attention to the glass office above the basketball court. “The officer up there has a gas gun,” he says. “And, yes, we have dropped chemical agents in the past,” he says, anticipating our next question.

As we walked outside through a courtyard, a few inmates yell out of their windows at us. It’s the rowdiest behavior we see.

Chappius, who has been more than generous with his time, runs off to a meeting. Wenderlich leads us out through an impressive, terrifying maze of barbed wire and razor ribbon. He points out one last photo opportunity before we go.

Alyssa

The view from Quarry Farm

Dan Tham — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 03:06:26 +0000

After Jervis Langdon died in 1870, his eldest daughter, Susan Langdon Crane, inherited the vacation home nestled in the hills of Elmira, Ny. Crane’s famous brother-in-law, Mark Twain, would spend his summers at Quarry Farm for more than 20 years, during which he wrote many of his most important works. Those include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Tramp Abroad, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi. In the video, Barbara Snedecor, director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies, talks about the importance of the view from Quarry Farm for Twain.

Video by Dan

Knowing your place

Dan Tham — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Elmira's Painted Lady Bed and Breakfast

On our first night in Elmira, Ny., we stayed at a bed and breakfast called the Painted Lady. The rooms were Twain-themed because Samuel Clemens had spent a significant portion of his life in Elmira, where he wrote some of his most important works. Loren was staying in Mark Twain’s Retreat, Alyssa in Becky’s Sanctuary, and I was happily left with Olivia’s Rose Garden, a palatial dream—memory foam mattress, jetted bathtub, mini-fridge—were it not for one thing. Every rose has its thorn, as they say. This thorn was porcelain and fitted in a colonial dress.

As I waited for the tub to fill with hot water and as I drizzled bath salts into the bubbling cauldron of comfort, I kept glancing over at the doll, perched on a chest in the bathroom. I expected that at any moment she would hop off, hobble toward me and bite my lower leg. Such was my fear. So I stared her down like John Wayne. Who would make the first move?

This is what I have to deal with in Elmira.

Quick on the draw, I slipped into the bathtub as soon as the water level was high enough to allow jet action. For good measure and modesty, I drew the shower curtain shut and prayed to Olivia Langdon Clemens for rosy respite.

Elmira is our seventh stop so far, not including brief jaunts in Alton and Springfield, Ill., and Vincennes, Ind. Almost three weeks in, we’ve already had a feel for the places we’ve visited, a feel for America itself. It’s a strange feeling leaving these cities and towns behind and getting on the interstate. Strange because I know I won’t return to, say, Peru, Ind., anytime soon.

This idea of place has been on my mind lately. Maybe it all started when I thought about how old the Painted Lady is (136 years) and how Twain might have played billiards downstairs during his Elmira years. I wonder if there was something about this town that inspired Twain’s deluge of writing.

Places transform people more than people can ever transform places. People are proud of places, escape from places, settle in places. Given the nature of our adventure, I figure it’s appropriate to be thinking about such things. Twain himself sure did. In his biography Mark Twain: A Life, Ron Powers writes, “Mark Twain’s steamboat years remained the most hallowed period of his life, and formed the epoch most often associated with him in American design and folklore. The Mississippi River dominates two of his greatest books and infuses their prose with unforgettable imagery and narrative tension.”

The three of us were having dinner at Charlie’s Café, a quick stroll from the Painted Lady and I asked the question, “Do you think the topography someone grows up with affects the sort of person they become?”

Alyssa is from Pittsburgh, which in pictures looks like a nice hilly riverfront city. Loren is from New York City, which I guess is the center of the universe. And I’m from Salt Lake City, ensconced in the Rocky Mountains and reeking of the lake for which it is named. Does being from the mountains make me more adventurous or willing to take risks?

Are coastal people too good for you? Do swamp-dwellers like a little mystery in their lives? How about the inhabitants of deserts? Do they have a refined sense of communion with death, and subsequently the fleetingness of beauty? I wonder how glacial terrain would affect the psyche.

After visiting the Elmira Correctional Facility (“We get everyone from DWIs to mass murderers in here,” Deputy Superintendent Steve Wenderlich said to me), we continued to Quarry Farm where Twain penned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi, among others. We saw for ourselves the view from Twain’s study, which he said “commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.” Partially obscured by trees, we could still make out the serpentine Chemung River, which no doubt reminded Twain of the Mississippi. And if any terrain were conducive to bringing back memories and to writing about them, the receding hills of Pennsylvania would probably be it.

Before continuing on to New York City, we watched “7th Street,” a documentary by Josh Pais about the changes in the Lower East Side over a ten-year period. A quote from the film really stood out to me:

“There are two ways to learn about the world. One way is to travel all over the planet and see all the different lands. And the other way is to stay in one place.”

The three of us have obviously opted for the former. The more people we meet, however, the clearer it becomes that staying put has its merits, too. But if it means putting miles between me and that wretched doll, I’ll take the road trip any day.

Dan

Two Elmira residents worthy of museums

Loren Ghiglione — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:00:16 +0000

The site of the future John W. Jones Museum, dedicated to a former slave who respectfully buried Confederate soldiers

Elmira, Ny.—a rust-belt railroad and manufacturing town of 29,200 that has lost 40 percent of its population since 1950—promotes itself as Mark Twain Country.

Home to Twain’s burial site and the Quarry Farm study where he wrote some of his most important works during 20 summers, Elmira revels in Mark Twains—from the Mark Twain Golf Course to the Mark Twain Travel Agency to Elmira College’s Center for the Study of Mark Twain.

But Elmira also recognizes two other residents, Frank Romeo and John W. Jones, with museums—well, almost museums.

Romeo came to Elmira from the southern Italian village of Molochio in 1912 at age 17. After U.S. military service during World War I that left him disabled, the entrepreneurial immigrant started selling popcorn from a pushcart in 1922. His New York State license from 1928 that permitted him “to hawk, peddle and vend.”

In 1928 a Chevrolet dealer provided a truck chassis that Romeo had made into the “Red Wagon.” From 1930 to his retirement in 1971, Romeo operated the popcorn truck at an intersection near Elmira’s Wisner Park. He sold the truck to a Bearsville, Ny., man who, after 15 years, offered to donate the popular truck to Elmira. The city did nothing.

But a group of antique-car enthusiasts started a restore-the-truck drive in 1988 with a fundraiser at which Romeo’s wife signed popcorn boxes that were then auctioned.

Organized as the Popcorn Truck Preservation Society, the enthusiasts built a glass-walled garage on the east end of Wisner Park, near where Romeo had sold popcorn for 41 years. The red-brick-and-green-trim building blends perfectly with the First Baptist Church building, now unoccupied, behind it.

If lucky you’ll visit Elmira on a day when the garage-museum is empty because the Preservation Society has put the Red Wagon to its intended use, the sale of what residents call the best popcorn in town.

John W. Jones, a runaway slave who escaped to Elmira by Underground Railroad in 1844, became an Underground agent in 1851. He arranged with Northern Central railroad workers to hide fugitive slaves in a baggage car that took them eventually across the Canadian border to St. Catherine, Ontario.

Jones reportedly sheltered many in his own home behind First Baptist Church. Of the 800 slaves he helped, none was captured and returned to the South.

As sexton for First Baptist Church, Jones took charge of all city burials. He felt responsible for the 12,123 Confederate soldiers locked behind the 12-foot-high stockade fence of Elmira Prison. In the year of the prison’s operation, 1864-65, about a quarter of the prison’s inmates died.

Poor health, a severe winter, overcrowding, scurvy and terrible sanitary conditions included contaminated drinking water caused the death of 2,963 inmates. A compassionate Jones buried every one and kept careful records (only seven are listed as unknown).

A memorial erected by Elmira High School students at Woodlawn National Cemetery remembers the Confederate soldiers buried “with kindness and respect” by Jones: “They have remained in these hallowed grounds…by family choice because of the honorable way in which they were laid to rest by a caring man.”

In 1998 Jones’ farm house at 1259 College Ave. was threatened with demolition. A local group decided to restore the house as the John W. Jones Museum, using recycled lumber, some possibly from Elmira Prison buildings. The group moved the house to 1250 Davis St., still on the Jones farm and across the street from Woodlawn Cemetery.

Restoration of the house has stalled (the building permit in the front window is dated Nov. 18, 2008). But Lucy Brown, president of the museum’s board, hopes the museum’s completion will honor the legacy of John W. Jones and “respect the dignity of every human being.”

Loren Ghiglione

Apple picking in New York

Alyssa Karas — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:05:43 +0000

StoneyRidge Orchard

Dan and I will do anything to escape a) the van and b) prepackaged food. So today the two of us detoured to StoneyRidge Orchard in Erin, Ny., to pick apples and fix both of those problems.

There is something quintessentially American about apple picking. StoneyRidge grows about a dozen different types of apples, and they have names like “Freedom” and “Liberty.” Although the trees were marked, we had trouble finding those specific apples. We ran up and down the orchard hill yelling that we were looking for America.

We never found Freedom, but Liberty tastes delicious.