There are many interesting things to do in the great city of Philadelphia. If you are interested in doing something off of the beaten path and out of the ordinary, visit the Eastern State Penitentiary. It will give you something to talk about and will be an experience like no other.

The penitentiary was founded in 1829 by Quakers. It was an old fashioned prison that wanted to reform its inmates through isolation and physical labor. At the time it was built it was the most expensive building ever built in the United States. Since it was built an estimated 300 prisons have been built copying its unique wagon wheel floor plan. It was a ground breaking prison in many ways. Over the years it has housed some of the countries most famous criminals including Willie Sutton and Al Capone. Today the prison serves as a tourist attraction as it was abandoned in 1971.

If you are interested in visiting the prison you have many options. The prison is open from April to November. You can go on a public daytime tour, you can schedule a private daytime group tour or you could visit the prison on a Terror Behind the Walls tour. This Halloween nighttime tour is one of the most interesting ways to visit the prison if you can handle it.

When it was completed in the 1830s, Eastern State loomed over Philadelphia like a fortress, its Gothic revival architecture sending a message to the citizens below: Stay on the straight and narrow, or else. It was also, as an early history of the penitentiary put it, "situated on one of the most elevated, airy, and healthy sites in the vicinity." Its mission was equally lofty. Eastern State, the world's first large-scale penitentiary, sought to reform its prisoners by subjecting them to isolation and forcing them to look inward for redemption.

Today, the view of Eastern State from downtown Philadelphia is obscured by the Fairmount and Spring Garden neighborhoods, with houses and a row of shops surrounding the 11-acre site. Its presence, however, is hardly diminished. "It's the most influential building in Pennsylvania, for starters," says my tour guide, Norman Johnston. An 84-year-old emeritus professor of sociology at nearby Arcadia University, Johnston has studied the penitentiary since the 1950s. "It was the first building from this part of the world to influence Europe. I can't think of another building here until the skyscraper that had such widespread influence."

Johnston leads me through the main entrance and down a narrow corridor. Sean Kelley, the site's program director, had warned me beforehand that I should wear wool socks. I'm glad I listened: The outside temperature is in the low 40s, but inside, it feels 10 degrees colder. It isn't just the cold, however, that makes me shudder. The penitentiary walls, eight feet thick at the base, are unyielding and imposing. One shrinks in their presence, and I begin to sense how isolated a prisoner must have felt from the bustling city outside