Western State Penitentiary. Riverside Intermediate Prison of Western Pennsylvania. State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh. Riverside Community Corrections Center. The Wall.
The prison that sits along the Ohio River north of the Chateau neighborhood has gone by so many names and phases of reconstruction that you’d be hard-pressed to find a Pittsburgher who knows that the narrow, castle-esque structure that stands there today isn’t the first local penitentiary to be colloquially known as “Western Pen.”
At the end of August, local historian Doug MacGregor independently published “Western State Penitentiary / SCI Pittsburgh: A History” — a book that spans the nearly 200-year history of the two structures and connects it to the limbo in which it sits today…