Record
Finding aid
1853/2014
Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey
Alcatraz, Cell House, Alcatraz Island: Historic American Buildings Survey record HABS CA-1792-A (Library of Congress)
The Library of Congress record for the HABS documentation of the Alcatraz Cell House: 29 photographs, 5 color transparencies, one measured drawing and 3 caption pages. It prints the island's latitude and longitude.
- Date
- 1853/2014
- Kind
- finding-aid
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- Library of Congress rights advisory: "No known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government; images copied from other sources may be restricted." Historic American Buildings Survey (Library of Congress). HABS is a National Park Service program; this archive treats the documentation as a work of the United States government on the strength of that advisory (17 U.S.C. § 105). No image is stored for this record.
The record describes the documentation of the Alcatraz Cell House, survey number HABS CA-1792-A, call number “HABS CAL,38-ALCA,1-A-“: 29 photographs, 5 color transparencies, 1 measured drawing and 3 photo caption pages. It lists Jet Lowe as photographer and the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area as sponsors. Its notes give building dates 1853 to 1859 (initial construction), 1909 to 1912 and 2003 to 2014 (subsequent work), and a National Register of Historic Places number, 76000209. The “1853/2014” date on this page is that building span, not a date of documentation.
The record prints a coordinate for the building: “latlong 37.826521, -122.422767.” That is the Library’s coordinate for the cell house, the only coordinate for a federal prison in this archive’s sources that a record itself prints. Three of the photographs are filed here: Broadway, a typical cell and the Cell Block D isolation cells. The record lists other Alcatraz structures (Warden’s House, Industries Building, Laundry, Power Plant and Guard Tower among them) as separate HABS entries whose rights lines were not checked individually and are not used.
