Alexander Berkman's Escape Tunnel

Russian-born Alexander Berkman was a passionate writer, activist, and outspoken anarchist. In July, 1892, at age 22, Berkman attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick by shooting him at close range inside the offices of Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Frick, in the employ of Andrew Carnegie, was largely responsible for bringing down the massive Homestead Strike of that summer. At that time in his life, Berkman believed in a particular definition of "propaganda by the deed" which followed that political assassinations would provide the necessary spark to fuel a working class revolution. Frick's adversarial connection to the Homestead situation made him a ripe candidate for Berkman's focus. He survived the "attentat", however, and Berkman wound up serving 14 years of a 22 year sentence in Western State Penitentiary near Pittsburgh - most of it in solitary confinement and with little access to visitors or regular mail.

In the fall of 1899, Emma Goldman (who was out of the country at the time), working with Eric B. Morton and one of Berkman's since-released friends from prison, began work on a tunnel which was to be dug from the basement of a rented house on Sterling Street, proceed under the prison wall, and surface inside a little-used structure in the prison yard. This was intended to facilitate Alexander Berkman's escape. The process of digging was incredibly laborious, however, involving incredible and often unforeseen obstacles. In July of 1900, on the cusp of its completion, the tunnel was discovered by neighborhood children who had broken into the house - one of the children turned out to be the son of a guard at the prison. Although prison officials could never find direct evidence implicating Berkman, he was nonetheless put in solitary confinement throughout and after the investigation.

Berkman was eventually released in 1906. Although he continued his activism into old age, his experience with the Frick scheme (and an aftermath he hadn't predicted) changed many of the views he had held in his youth. He remained an avowed anarchist until his death.

In his book, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Berkman describes the aborted escape attempt in great detail, as does Emma Goldman in her autobiography Living My Life. In Memoirs, he specifically describes that, upon closing the investigation, prison officials filled the tiny, hand-carved tunnel with cement. Although the house on Sterling Street has since given way to a parking lot, I believe that this vein of concrete which filled the tunnel remains buried: an underground cast of the memory of an almost overwhelmingly futile, yet nearly successful, attempt at the liberation of one man by his closest friends. The aim of this project is to bring to light this subterranean monument, and in doing so suggest unconventional memorials which may exist just below our feet.