Spring Break: The Great Escape: Stories of Resistance and Creativity at Eastern State

A Week of Immersive History, Storytelling, and Hands-On Discovery. 

This Spring Break, Eastern State invites visitors to explore powerful stories of resilience, creativity, and resistance within one of America’s most influential prisons, and to reflect on what those stories mean for our communities today. 

Through interactive tours, pop-up talks, music, poetry, and hands-on activities, Spring Break at Eastern State examines how incarcerated people have used creativity and ingenuity, art, faith, and humor in a system designed to contain, control, and isolate.  

Through these interactive programs, visitors will learn the powerful and fascinating stories of escape and resistance at Eastern State. 

• Mini Tour: The Speakeasy: Prohibition, Temperance & Sound 
  In this short, immersive experience, visitors are transported to the 1920s, a period shaped by the Temperance Movement’s call for moral reform and the federal government’s sweeping ban on alcohol. While Prohibition was intended to strengthen families and communities, it also produced a vast underground economy, reshaped American cities, and changed the relationship between citizens and the state in lasting ways. Through the Speakeasy Mini Tour, guests encounter the sounds and stories of bootleggers and clandestine musicians whose performances animated hidden rooms, built community, and quietly challenged a rapidly expanding system of surveillance and control.
  
  Live musical elements create atmosphere and anchor the historical narrative, offering a moment to reflect on how sound, storytelling, and shared experience became powerful tools for connection, identity, and endurance during one of the most transformative eras in American history. 

• Pop-Up Talk: Al Capone & Policing in Prohibition-Era America 
  In this short pop-up talk, visitors will hear about Al Capone’s arrest and imprisonment and the broader rise of Prohibition-era policing practices, including early forms of stop-and-frisk, and how those systems shaped Philadelphia and American law enforcement and community relations. 

• Mini Tour: The Tunnel Story: Ingenuity, Surveillance, and Control 
  Learn about the most famous escape attempt in Eastern State’s history and how incarcerated people circumvented intense surveillance and restrictive architecture. This tour examines what “escape” meant inside a carceral system, the consequences that followed, and how these stories reveal the lengths people went to in pursuit of freedom and escape. 

• Interactive Activity: Secret Letter Delivery
  In this sitewide interactive activity inspired by historical communication networks inside prisons, visitors explore coded language and symbolism in music and letters. Follow clues to deliver “letters” between secret locations around the site, learning how incarcerated people found creative ways to maintain communication, preserve relationships, and share news. (Completing the route reveals the password to our speakeasy experience!) 

• Pop-Up Talk: The Power of Music, Resistance, and Healing 
  With Dr. Timothy Welbeck 
  Join Dr. Timothy Welbeck for an intimate pop-up conversation on the transformative power of music within spaces of incarceration and reentry. Drawing on his scholarship in hip hop, Black history, and urban studies, Dr. Welbeck explores how music has long served as a tool for storytelling, identity, resistance, and healing, particularly for Black men navigating carceral systems in American cities. This conversation situates music not as entertainment alone, but as a form of survival, cultural memory, and self-expression in environments shaped by control and isolation. 

• Drop-In Art Activity 
  With Mark Loughney 
  Join Philadelphia-based artist Mark Loughney in his exhibit Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration, for a family-friendly, hands-on art activity that explores ideas of transformation through insect imagery. Inspired by the life cycles of insects—creatures that change form, adapt, and endure—participants will create an original artwork using simple materials. 
   
  Families will be invited to reflect on what transformation can mean in their own lives: growth, change, resilience, or new beginnings. Mark will offer demonstrations and creative guidance, encouraging participants to experiment with shapes, patterns, and textures to build an insect-inspired piece that expresses their ideas.
  
  All supplies are provided, and no prior art experience is needed. No reservations required. Visitors may drop in at any point during the workshop and stay as long as space allows. Space is limited. 

All Spring Break activities are included with admission.