Alcatraz Island

Alcatraz Island covers just 22 acres / 8.9 ha, a steep-sided knob of rock about 1.25 miles / 2 km off San Francisco's northern waterfront. Its highest point stands about 135 feet / 41 m above the water. Small as it is, the island sits near the mouth of the bay, in the path of the tides that surge in and out through the Golden Gate, and that position explains nearly everything that has happened on it, from lighthouse and fort to the federal prison that made its name shorthand for a place no one leaves.

Geography did the jailer's work. The rock offers little shelter, and the water around it is cold and pulled by strong tidal currents, which made escape by swimming nearly impossible. The same exposure made it a natural lookout over the bay entrance. On June 1, 1854, the Alcatraz light became the first lighthouse lit on the U.S. West Coast, and a replacement tower built in 1909 still stands. The name traces to 1775, when the Spanish navigator Juan Manuel de Ayala charted the bay and labeled a nearby island La Isla de los Alcatraces, a phrase usually read as pelicans. The name later shifted to this rock.

The U.S. Army fortified the island in the 1850s, completing the first Fort Alcatraz in 1858, and later used it as a military prison. From August 1934 to March 1963 it held a maximum-security federal penitentiary. Soon after it closed, a group of Native American activists occupied the island from November 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, a protest that lasted nearly 19 months.

The National Park Service took over Alcatraz in 1972 as part of the new Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It now draws more than 1.4 million visitors a year, all of whom arrive by ferry from San Francisco. From the island's terraces, the view takes in the city skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge and Angel Island, the larger and greener island just to the north.