![Inside the Olympic Prison [from Very Special Episodes]](https://cdn-images-3.listennotes.com/podcasts/bad-seeds/inside-the-olympic-prison-Wp732yg8ks6-GCYFLAOEyeW.1400x1400.jpg "Inside the Olympic Prison [from Very Special Episodes]")
00:00:05
Speaker 1: Every four years, a small army of laborers works for months, if not years, to construct the mini venues needed for the Olympic Games. A site is selected, blueprints are drawn up, money is allocated, and then, long before the teams of international competitors ever show up, construction workers descend, building inspiring sites where Olympic glory will be won. When the Games are over, those same newly constructed venues are often torn down or left to sit abandoned, but not always some find a second purpose. For instance, for the two thousand and eight Summer Olympics hosted in Beijing, the Chinese built this visually astounding venue nicknamed the water Cube. The site hosted many aquatic events like swimming, diving, and synchronized swimming. Now it's a popular water park for the people of China. As for the stadium for ice skating and ice hockey built for the nineteen twenty eight and nineteen forty eight Winter Olympics in Saint Mauritz, Switzerland, well it eventually became a private residence owned by one man, Rolf Sachs, and the same site that hosted the Olympic opening ceremony. He later turned into a private garden United States has hosted the Olympics more than any other country. For the summer Games, there was the nineteen oh four Saint Louis Games and the nineteen thirty two Los Angeles Games, and again in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty four and finally in Atlanta in nineteen ninety six. For the Winter Games, Lake Tahoe in nineteen sixty, Salt Lake City in two thousand and two, and one sleep hosted it twice, a small town in upstate New York called Lake Placid in nineteen thirty two and nineteen eighty. The USA holds another Olympic record as the host in nineteen eighty four the Lake Placid Winter Games. The Olympic village that was constructed to house the many international Olympians was later transformed into one of the most controversial structures in the olympics near three thousand year history, leading to protests that would follow for years. Welcome to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host Zarin Burnett and this is the Olympic Prison.
00:02:58
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Very SPECIALTS Episodes. My name is Jason English. I am usually joined here at the top by my co host Zaron Burnett and Danish Schwartz podcast legends both. It's just me today, but I'm going to get you back out to Zaren in a second. I was just going through our story ideas file. This is a mix of half baked concepts, amazing facts, and more than a fair share of non sequiturs. There's some great Olympics facts here. We aren't going to be using any of these as jumping off points for very special episodes during this Olympic cycle, but I figured I could share a few here. In nineteen thirty two, Brazil couldn't afford to send its athletes to the Olympics in la so they loaded their ship with coffee and sold it along the way. We should probably have done that as an episode. Put a pin in that. Until twenty twenty eight, tug of war and croquet used to be Olympic sports. I think they should bring both of those back. At the nineteen twelve Olympics in Stockholm, future General George S. Patten finished fifth in the first ever modern pentathlon. The nineteen seventy six Winter Olympics were awarded to Denver, but Colorado voters rejected the public financing of the games and Innsbruck had to host instead, and between nineteen twelve and nineteen forty eight, art competitions were a part of the Olympics. Medals were awarded for architecture, music, painting, and sculpture. We actually did do an episode about this during the Paris Games in twenty twenty four. I will link to that in the show notes. Another question that always comes up, what do they do with the structures built for the Olympic Games. For that, I'm going to throw it on out to Zaren.
00:04:50
Speaker 1: Located in upstate New York, surrounded by snow capped mountains and the idyllic forests of the Adirondacks. In nineteen eighty the town of Lake Plas It was a small, unassuming mountain town of just about twenty seven hundred people. Its scale was a key reason the Olympic Planning Committee eyed it as a host for the Winter Games. Another reason was snow, copious amounts of snow.
00:05:18
Speaker 3: Lake Placid is known as the Winter sports Capital of the World. That is our tagline and that's how it's marketed. And it goes back before the nineteen thirty two Games, back with the Grand Hotels when people were coming up here romanticizing the worlderness and getting out of the.
00:05:35
Speaker 4: Cities for vacations.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: They came up here and it's like a snowy tundra in the winter time up here, and people are coming. They're like, Okay, what are we going to do? Like, we need some kind of entertainment, recreation. So that's when winter sports got brought in.
00:05:50
Speaker 1: That's Courtney Bastion, the director of the Lake Placid Olympic Museum. Courtney was kind enough to speak with us about Lake Placid's long and storied play in Olympic history. The nineteen thirty two Winter Olympics is a point of pride for Lake Placid and the surrounding Adirondacks area, which played host to the international community. Lake Placid had another advantage. There was also a fine collection of housing options ready made for the international athletes who would come to compete.
00:06:23
Speaker 4: During the time of nineteen thirty two.
00:06:25
Speaker 3: It was also the Grand Hotel era, so we had a lot of Grand hotels in Lake Placid. So one of them, for example, was the Lake Placid Club, founded by Melville Dewey of the Dewey decimal system.
00:06:38
Speaker 1: The Dewey family was the chief reason the Winter Games came to Lake Placid.
00:06:43
Speaker 3: Godfrey Dewey, Melville's son, was really interested in bringing the Olympics to Lake Placid. He went to Saint Maurt's the second Winter Olympic Games to learn all he could about hosting and presenting an Olympic bed.
00:06:56
Speaker 1: That bid was a complete success, and as a result, on April tenth, nineteen twenty nine, Lake Placid was awarded the third Olympic Winter Games.
00:07:06
Speaker 5: Once we were awarded that, you know, our small town approved all the bonds that it needed to build all the facilities.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: That's the Lake Placid Olympic Museum's Collections manager, Julia Hermann. Once it was official the Winter Games were coming to Lake Placid, the organizers faced a huge challenge, more like a global crisis. The stock market crashed in October of nineteen twenty nine. However, that historic financial collapse didn't stop tiny Lake Placid from investing huge sums of money in order to construct the many needed venues for the nineteen thirty two Winter Games. Luckily, snowy Lake Placid already did have some key infrastructure.
00:07:51
Speaker 3: Lake nineteen oh four nineteen oh five was the first time winter sports came and then the clubs started developing their own winter sports teams. They built the first stop slides and ski jumps as part of the club's identity and recreation and promoting the club itself.
00:08:08
Speaker 4: And then we get into the Olympics.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: Rather unsurprisingly, and despite the financial challenge, the nineteen thirty two Games surpassed expectations. The Winter Olympics went off without a hitch. Seventeen nations, represented by two hundred and fifty two athletes, competed for gold. For the village of Lake Placid. The Games were largely a success. After the closing ceremony, the remote mountain town was left to pay off a modest deficit of roughly fifty two thousand dollars. That's not bad considering the Great Depression. Fast forward to the nineteen seventies, when the Olympic Committee was looking for the next spot for the Olympic Games, Lake Placid was at the top of the list of potential hosts. Again, here's Julia Herman.
00:09:00
Speaker 5: Part of it was sustainability. You know, we already had some of the venues, we just had to update them. And it was also the fact that we had already kind of been through the ringer on how to host an Olympics how to put a bit together.
00:09:11
Speaker 1: As Courtney Bastian explains, the residents of Lake Placid were eager to have the Olympics back in nineteen eighty.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: They were proud in wanting to revive our legacy and stay involved in winter sports on a global stage.
00:09:28
Speaker 1: The Olympics were still recovering from the seventy two Munich Games when there was a bloody terrorist attack. The committee believed that since the small, sleepy New York village of Lake Placid was far removed from any major population center, it would be a perfectly safe location for the many international athletes.
00:09:49
Speaker 5: And not a lot of host cities have the honor of being a two time host city, so having that honor again in nineteen eighty was great for this great for this town.
00:10:00
Speaker 1: When you see, Lake Placid had this one other, not small problem to overcome. The era of the grand hotels had long since passed. While Lake Placid certainly had the facilities for athletes to compete the ski jumps, the bob sled runs, and ice rinks when it was awarded the nineteen eighty Winter Games, what it didn't have was anywhere for the roughly eleven hundred Olympians and their coaches to sleep. Figuring that out fell to one man, Republican Congressman representing upstate New York, Robert McEwan. He lobbied the federal government for the money needed to construct a new Olympic village. After many false starts, finally he was able to secure twenty eight million dollars for the creation of the new facility. And then there was one other, not small problem. The federal government agreed to put up the money, but the money came with strings. When the games ended, the new facility had to become a permanent structure, one with some practical secondary purpose.
00:11:07
Speaker 5: And given the amount of money that was given for the Olympic village, I definitely think they didn't want to see it so empty.
00:11:15
Speaker 4: So that was why there was that contingency.
00:11:17
Speaker 3: With that a lot of locals, officials, and citizens.
00:11:21
Speaker 4: They initially proposed.
00:11:23
Speaker 3: Other uses for the facilities, such as an athletic training center, youth hostels, affordable housing, college dormitories.
00:11:33
Speaker 1: Well, those were all good ideas. None of those were approved. Instead, a different idea for a secondary usage won the day, but none.
00:11:42
Speaker 3: Of those options offered as much Federal assistance in funding as a federal prison would have.
00:11:49
Speaker 1: That's right, a federal prison. The agreement was that the federal government would build an Olympic village for Lake Placid. Once the games were over, the small town would hand the former Olympic village back over to the Feds and they would transform it into a new federal prison.
00:12:09
Speaker 3: During this era too, there was federal prison overcrowding also, and the federal government was looking for places to build more prisons and for prison expansion. So we're now looking at the nineteen eighty we need housing for athletes, governments looking for expanding on their federal prisons, and the Olympic villages in the regulations for security were almost equivalent to a medium security facility.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: Thus the idea of the Olympic prison was born. Obviously, turning an Olympic village into a prison was a controversial idea.
00:12:51
Speaker 5: If you just look at newspapers or even like New York Times articles from like outside of just the at around ACKs, I mean, you could tell there were reactions and they were concerned about the idea of housing elite athletes and something that was clearly designed to be a prison.
00:13:06
Speaker 1: Afterwards, the story of the potential Olympic prison soon moved from headlines to the streets, and the pushback begins. After this break, in the nineteen seventies, America was once again mired in a severe economic downturn, not as bad as the Great Depression, but the explosion of stagflation and the widening gyre of economic recession crippled the country. It also limited the imaginations of the powers that be. It made them shy to embrace big new ideas. In fact, things got so bad that in nineteen seventy five, President Gerald Ford refused to loan New York City the money it's so desperately needed to avoid immediate bankruptcy. The financial center of the world was set to go belly up. As The New York Times reported in nineteen seventy five.
00:14:09
Speaker 6: Treasury Secretary of William E. Simon declared that mister Ford's response to New York should be regarded as a signal to the city that it take the extremely difficult political actions it must take to put its fiscal and financial house in order.
00:14:25
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, one year earlier, the tiny upstate New York village of Lake Placid had been awarded the nineteen eighty Olympic Games. It sure seemed as if Lake Placid only ever got to play host to the Winter Games during a global financial collapse. What tough luck for the tiny mountain town. But this is how and why a rather strange idea like turning the Olympic Village into a federal prison made perfect sense at the time. The prison was billed as a cost efficient solution to an expensive problem. With money very much on their minds, the federal government and the Olympic Committee pushed ahead with their plans to build the Olympic Village and repurpose it as a federal prison. But they kept their plans hush hush because they knew if their plans ever leaked, activists and protesters would surely step up to fight back and stop the so called Olympic prison, which is exactly what happened. The plans did leak, and as soon as the plans became public, an editor from the local Lake Placid News wrote a story about how he couldn't recall any public hearings or community consultations for this new federal prison. A local magazine called frying Pan published an article that called into question the secretive process of approval for construction. It criticized how the public comment period and the environmental review process were both seemingly shielded from the public. The article stayed that quote, this whole shady deal was pulled off because of the concept of secondary use. Such is the fine art of politics. That same article went on to say that quote, had the regular procedure been followed, there would have been a flap before any groundbreaking.
00:16:20
Speaker 7: Instead of going through a regular appropriation process in Congress, where there would be committee hearings and there would be an opportunity to mark up the bill and then send it to the House floor and send it over to the Senate floor and have real debate, what Congress did was simply take the fiscal year in nineteen seventy seven budget that had already been enacted and reprogrammed the necessary funding that had already been enacted for other projects and redirected it to the project in Raybrook. So and this was done without public hearings, It was done without public oversight. And I'll just say this completely anti democratic process was used to get this project bill.
00:17:00
Speaker 1: That's professor Jeff Hall. He's the author of the excellent book A Prison in the Woods about the history of prisons in New York and the construction of the Federal Correction Institution Raybrook, aka the Olympic Prison. As Professor Hall points out, the heated protests against the Olympic Prison largely came from media outlets and folks who lived outside of the Lake Placid area. At least at first.
00:17:27
Speaker 7: The local press was in love with the idea. And this is something that you see repeatedly during this period of what we call mass incarceration in northern New York in the late twentieth century. The local press was concerned mainly with the economic impact. Many people in the area thought, Okay, we'll have an Olympic village. We'll have this federal prison. Afterward, we'll have some jobs there.
00:17:53
Speaker 1: Much like the rest of America, Lake Placid was mired in an economic malaise, which explains why at first first the new federal prison was seen as a lucrative source of jobs and economic stability. It would be a financial boon for those months when snow didn't blanket the ground and transform the area into a money making winter wonderland. But once the unvarnished realities of the project came into full view, public opinion shifted.
00:18:24
Speaker 7: Once the environmental damage became apparent. There was a shift in how the story was being covered, and I think that shift also reflected public opinion of the project.
00:18:36
Speaker 1: So that was one concern environmental impact. But there was another.
00:18:41
Speaker 7: Six months later, when the construction began without any notification to local residents that the construction was starting. Then you started to see local residents turn against the project in large numbers, mainly based on the effects that this project was going to have on the quality of the neighborhood where they lived.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: That was a major concern, how would a federal prison affect the idyllic Adirondack wilderness. To overcome this environmental hurdle, the federal government ended up buying a piece of land in nearby Raybrook. The site was located across the street from an old tuberculosis hospital.
00:19:22
Speaker 7: It was owned by the state, but it was mostly forested land that was used by hikers and fishermen for recreational activities. So what ended up happening, which I described in that chapter of my book, is that the construction was extremely destructive to the local environment, to the wetlands surrounding the property, to the local freshwater supplies, to the wildlife populations, and there was very little recourse for local residents or even for people who were concerned with environmental quality, because the state could step in. The Olympic organizers, of course, wanted the facility built.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: And so in the summer and fall of nineteen seventy seven.
00:20:03
Speaker 7: The project is underway, the land is being cleared, the buildings are going to soon be built. The public opinion and the news media have basically turned against the project.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: A protest group formed. It was called STOP, short for Stop the Olympic Prison. Stop wasn't a brand, it was an instruction. Stop didn't just oppose a prison. They challenged how it was approved, where it was built, and who it would ultimately hold. STOP members took to the streets. They lined the road for the Olympic Torch runs, and they held signs declaring that Olympic Torch equals freedom and Olympic Prison equals slavery.
00:20:49
Speaker 7: So STOP was really organized. It was a loose coalition of churches and civil rights organizations, a lot of individuals, a lot of clergy and intellectuals across the state of New York and including in the Lake Placid area in northern New York State and its message, which for the late nineteen seventies sort of previewed a lot of anti prison organizing that would come in the eighties, nineties, and early part of this century. Its message initially was mainly focused on the horrors that had been experienced at Attica in nineteen seventy one, where there was this horrific, deadly crackdown on a legitimate uprising of incarcerated people against the terrible conditions they experienced inside the state prison, and there was intense concern among folks who affiliated with STOP that this new federal prison in Raybrook would eventually replicate the same conditions.
00:21:54
Speaker 1: The dangers and doom of mass incarceration were not something many people focused on at the time, not at least prior to the prison uprising at Attica in nineteen seventy one, when the governor of New York sent in armed soldiers to put down a prison revolt. The result forty three men died, thirty three inmates, and ten prison guards. In the following years, Attica became a major talking point in terms of what goes down behind prison walls in America. But not only that, Americans were also wrestling with what kind of country we'd become. This was motivated by the revelations that came out of the Watergate scandaled in nineteen seventy four and seventy five. Altogether, this general distrust of the federal government and the eye opening violence of Attica merged in the hearts and minds of protesters and provided language to wigld against the federal government and their Olympic prison plans. There was another major concern for STOP and the affiliated protesters, a concern that would ring familiar to listeners today.
00:23:04
Speaker 7: In the United States in the nineteen seventies. By nineteen seventy six seventy seven, the majority of people incarstrated in the United States came from African American and Latino communities in the United States, and mainly impoverished people of color, mainly as a result of anti narcotics laws and straight up corruption from police departments that landed increasingly large numbers of poor people of color in prisons.
00:23:32
Speaker 1: This was a real and tangible and tragic outcome that the protesters felt they could leverage to bring greater attention to the construction of the so called Olympic Prison.
00:23:45
Speaker 7: Many members of STOP were pointing this out and saying, hey, like we're going to house elite athletes in this facility, we can use this as an opportunity to publicize this dirty secret of the United Lace States that we like to portray ourselves as so pure and so superior to other countries. But we're going to house elite Olympic athletes, mostly white, inside a facility that will someday incarcery and likely torture or men of color. And so I think wisely, like any activist organization would, they took advantage of the moment and they're like, Hey, this is a moment where we will get attention. This is something people will pay attention to.
00:24:29
Speaker 1: There was another concern. Some locals feared that the new inmates at the prison would have families, and those family members would come to visit. Some might even move to town.
00:24:40
Speaker 7: You had this radio call in show where the host spent an hour taking calls from people, and that was the focus was will their relatives move here? Will their relatives move here and apply for Medicaid? Will they move here and apply for snap benefits? Will they move here and put their kids in the local schools? Will they generate solid waste? Will they cause crime?
00:25:08
Speaker 1: There was also one other super important angle to consider in terms of protesting the Olympic prison. It came down to three words, the Cold War. Since the Cold War was very much still a thing in the nineteen seventies, obvious comparisons were made between how the USA and the Soviet Union handled the question of what to do with an Olympic village after their Olympic games were done and over, And it was highly embarrassing for the USA when.
00:25:40
Speaker 7: And it became known what the Soviet Union was going to do with its Olympic housing for nineteen eighty when it hosted the Summer Olympics in Moscow, they were building a brand new Olympic village that was going to be turned into apartments. So there was this strident contrast, right the United States was in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Soviates are building apartments for people to live in after the Olympics. We're hosting the Olympics, and we're building an athlete's village that will become a prison. So it didn't really make the United States look too good.
00:26:13
Speaker 1: By this point, the protests had moved from the streets into a surprising place, church services. The Civil rights era had galvanized churches and religious leaders and drew them into the fight for human rights. Now they had a new battlefield on which to fight prison reform.
00:26:32
Speaker 7: This was time when churches were becoming more involved, especially in the North. We're becoming more involved in social activism around racial discrimination and discrimination against the poor. I mean, churches had been heavily involved in the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties, and I think for many churches in the North, this was sort of a natural progression for them to sort of identify a new area which was squarely within the realm of civil rights that they could get involved in. So I think that many clergy in Northern New York did sort of jump on the stop bandwagon. But I think it's also important to point out that the Catholic Church in Northern New York, which is the single largest Christian denomination in that area, was officially in favor of this project. The local bishop of the diocese encouraged his clergy to give sermons and explain why the project was important for the area.
00:27:33
Speaker 1: While the Catholic Church officially supported construction of the Olympic Prison, not all of the local Catholic religious leaders followed the party line.
00:27:43
Speaker 7: There were some Catholic clergy who did join stop, but many did sort of follow the diocese in supporting the projects. But I do think for most clergy and for most sort of church leaders in the area, this was sort of seen as a natural progression of work they had previously participated in terms of promoting civil rights.
00:28:03
Speaker 1: In order to bolster local support for the prison's construction, the Catholic Church argued that the prison would actually improve the lives of prisoners. That argument came down to one word, overcrowding. The Catholic Church put forward the idea that quote, the nation cannot neglect one of the larger problems of our existing penal system, namely the overcrowding of our prisons. Convicted felons are also fellow human beings who deserve humane living conditions fully as much as other members of society. To deny therefore, the need for humane incarceration in institutions is cruel. Again, this was a result of the long shadow of the bloody violence of Attica. When he discusses this era of prison reform, Professor Hall holds strong opinions about the prisons, their conditions, and their downstream effects. For one, he's seen firsthand how life inside a prison affects a person.
00:29:08
Speaker 7: My father worked as a correction officer in one of the state's largest prisons, which was called Clinton Correctional Facility, and I always had a curiosity about his job. He seemed to hate his job. He seemed like a pretty unhappy person.
00:29:23
Speaker 1: Not only that, his father also quite literally brought his work home.
00:29:28
Speaker 7: He actually brought incarcerated people to our house. And is actually the first time I ever encountered an African American person was when he brought a van filled with incarcerated people to our house while he was on his way to New York City. And also, just as I got older, I knew that there were all these other prisons in the area where I grew up, but I didn't really know anything about how they got there, who was involved, why they ended up where they ended up.
00:29:56
Speaker 1: Professor Hall's curiosity about incarcerated people as well as prison guards like his father, blossomed into a lifelong interest in life inside prison and how it affects life outside prison, which raises a secondary question, how would the Olympic prison affect the community with so many prison guards coming home after witnessing or participating in the traumas that occur inside the prison walls where they work.
00:30:23
Speaker 7: My father suffered from severe mental illness, from severe depression and anxiety that my mother informed me began right when he started working for the corrections department, and that many of his colleagues also took these jobs and then, for a variety of reasons, traumas they either participated in or witnessed or experienced while they were working in these facilities, suffered severe psychological damage and to the point where I really only knew my father when he was severely mentally ill. And my father died by suicide, and I sort of attribute that to his work in the correction system.
00:31:11
Speaker 1: When asked if he and his father ever discussed FCI Raybrooke aka the Olympic Prison, professor Hall recalls how his father's line of thinking about it changed and evolved over time.
00:31:25
Speaker 7: Definitely, we discussed FCI Raybrook. He did sort of come to understand the foolishness of all this prison construction, and I think he also, by the end of his life, had connected the traumas he witnessed and experienced and participated in to his own wellbeing. I think he sort of understood the connection by that point. But that's something that state federal correctional leaders don't like talking about. Incarcerated people dying in prison, dying in jail workers, dying of heart attacks at very early ages, or dying by suicide. These are issues we just don't talk about, and because we don't talk about them, for a lot of people, they don't exist.
00:32:03
Speaker 1: Remember, Lake Placid is tiny, which is twenty seven hundred or so people, with about two hundred jobs from the prison facility. That means about eight percent of the population would be working at this facility. This begs the question, how would all the pain and trauma inside the prison bleed out into the wintertime wonderland and affect this picturesque community.
00:32:29
Speaker 7: Nobody talks about that. Those prisons that were built there were sold as engines of economic vitality for dying communities, and so anything that could call into question the value of those facilities is simply covered up, and the mental health crisis in prisons among everyone involved and their families is a real thing.
00:32:54
Speaker 1: In a story published at the time by Common Wheel magazine, the writer posed series of all the many compelling questions to ask about the so called Olympic prison and I quote, would we allow American athletes to live in a Russian prison at the nineteen eighty Games? Is it worth at all to place inmates three hundred miles from family to give a depressed area a few jobs? Is such an arrangement justified? Will the TV programs on ABC in nineteen eighty be worth the macabre prison background? What is America's sole worth? When Professor Hall hears those same high minded questions, his reply is rather trenchant. Those questions all remind him of today and.
00:33:44
Speaker 7: Specifically how little progress we've made. We think about the coming World Cup in the United States next year, and more so the Los Angeles Olympics in twenty twenty eight. Stories that are underreported, such as the forced displacement of people who are unhoused or who are living in unstable housing situations in areas that will be on television or that are adjacent to athletic facilities, that will happen in the United States. So the words of Commonweal magazine in the late nineteen seventies, when the Olympic Prison was being planned and being built, Yes, they resonate today because we're doing the same things, and it seems like there is a larger share of our population today that is also okay with this, Like so that if we were going to build a prison to house athletes in twenty twenty eight, that there would be a sizeable chunk of the population that would be like, you know what, no problem, why not.
00:34:51
Speaker 1: We like to think that as time passes we become a better nation, one filled with citizens who've learned from the past and are made or for it. Professor Hall indicates that may not be the case, at least in terms of how we view prisons, whether it's an Olympic prison or a regular prison. For now, let's take a break, listen to some advertisements, and when we're back, it'll be time for the opening ceremony of the nineteen eighty Winter Olympics. As the nineteen seventies became history, despite all the protests from the locals and the Olympians alike, despite international critics and all the controversy, despite the efforts of local clergy and celebrities like actor Ozzie Davis, who lent his stardom to the stop movement, the Olympic prison moved forward. Soon after the Olympic village opened, the Olympians arrived to fill it, and you better believe some of them realized immediately what this place really was. Julia Hermann recalls that members of the Soviet men's ice hockey team were shocked.
00:36:09
Speaker 4: What Fatissoff said.
00:36:10
Speaker 5: As a young man, you think it's going to be this wonderful celebration as in the Olympics, and instead you're treated to a barbed wire prison and watch towers. We slept in prison cells. Boris Kalov said it was a terrible living arrangement, just terrible. No other Olympics has launched us so poorly. The conditions were less than minimal, with barbed wire fences and thin blankets, and then Sergei Makarov had said it was atrocious.
00:36:34
Speaker 1: For the eleven hundred athletes. The newly built complex had nine hundred and thirty seven rooms, or as they'd later be called cells. Each room was roughly eight feet by thirteen feet and was intended to house two Olympians. The cells had cinderblock walls and prison doors.
00:36:54
Speaker 5: The prison doors were very heavy, so someone woke up at six am and slammed those doors then the whole building woke up, so a lot of the European countries were not very happy with it. Some delegations even refused to let their athletes stay on site, calling the rooms claustrophobic and jail cell like, So they actually rented out some hotel rooms or some homes within Lake Placid to house their athletes during the games.
00:37:18
Speaker 1: But for the ones who weren't so lucky, who had to stay at the Olympic Village outside of the confines of their prison cell rooms, what were the rest of the accommodations like.
00:37:28
Speaker 5: The Olympic Village was designed as a campus style, which is also a prison architecture design. So this type of design features a series of separate and freestanding buildings that are arranged around the central area that resemble a college campus. You had your dormitories, and then you might have like your student center, your rec center, that kind of thing.
00:37:48
Speaker 1: If you focused on just the amenities and you ignored the two eleven foot tall perimeter fences, the guard towers, and the cinder block rooms with barred windows and the little peaks slot in the door, you could almost forget that the complex was intended to be a prison. Almost the amenities included two.
00:38:09
Speaker 5: Three hundred and fifty seat cafeterias, a medical clinic, an entertainment center that had a theater, a cinema, a discotheque, a library, a full service bank, a post office, a shopping center, a game room, a transportation center, and a.
00:38:23
Speaker 1: Chapel as well. The Olympians also were provided star studded entertainment in the Olympic Village.
00:38:30
Speaker 4: Fun fact I always liked to throw in.
00:38:31
Speaker 5: Dean Warwick actually performed live at this Olympic village for the athletes.
00:38:35
Speaker 1: There was also a shopping center that had souvenirs from around the world and an arcade.
00:38:41
Speaker 5: The arcade was also very popular with the athletes. They had just classic games from the eighties, like Space Invaders. They had pinball machines which were very very popular pool tables.
00:38:56
Speaker 1: The nineteen eighty Winter Olympics opening ceremony took place on February thirteenth, nineteen eighty, and it very much captured the spirit of the times in America.
00:39:05
Speaker 5: It was an outdoor opening ceremony, definitely a lot fancier than nineteen thirty two. We had synchronized skaters and we had a live Orchestra, and then we had the Parade of Nations of course, so we had thirty seven nations in nineteen eighty, so considerably bigger than nineteen thirty two.
00:39:23
Speaker 1: The American athletes arrived for the Parade of Nations dressed as one of America's favorite symbols of its past, the cowboy.
00:39:31
Speaker 5: They were all ducked out in Levi's because Levi's was the outfitter for teen USA that year. So they had a classic sherline jacket on with a cowboy hat, Levi's, Jean's cowboy boots.
00:39:41
Speaker 4: And a plaid button up.
00:39:43
Speaker 5: And they entered in and for the torch relay, doctor Charles Curve Arizona was unanimously.
00:39:50
Speaker 4: Selected by his fellow torch bearers to light.
00:39:52
Speaker 5: The cauldron and so he let the cauldron doves who were released, and it was just this very pomp and circumstance, exciting event harolding in at the start of the nineteen eighty Games.
00:40:02
Speaker 1: To commemorate that special moment, the Olympic Museum in Lake Placid has a display of the opening ceremony outfits and it's a big hit with visitors.
00:40:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, they love the cowboy hats. I think it's very Americana blue jeans. We get a lot of positive feedback from visitors who get a kick out of the cowboy hots.
00:40:22
Speaker 4: For sure.
00:40:23
Speaker 1: Looking back, it all very much feels like the dawn of Reagan's America. When many folks think back to the nineteen eighty Winter Olympics, the standout moment is the victory of the US men's hockey team over the Soviet Union's men's hockey team, known as the Miracle on ice, This was a defining moment in the mythos of the Cold War.
00:40:50
Speaker 5: The United States wasn't expected to even make it to the metal round in the ice Hockey Tournament in nineteen eighty, but they defied all odds and they played the Soviet Union in not tech the quote unquote gold medal game, but they did play them, and they defeated them four to three.
00:41:06
Speaker 1: That magical moment was also made far more memorable thanks to legendary broadcaster.
00:41:12
Speaker 4: With Al Michaels.
00:41:13
Speaker 5: Of course, the famous call do you believe in miracles? Kind of cementing that as one of.
00:41:17
Speaker 4: The most famous sports moments in history.
00:41:19
Speaker 5: I mean that happens here in Lake Placid, so it resonates with a lot of our visitors, and especially the people who were alive when it happened, who come here as kind of like a pilgrimage in a way, like they have to come see it. All the hockey fans, all the hockey kids know what it is and they absolutely love it. So it's event we hold near and dear to our hearts here in Lake Placid.
00:41:38
Speaker 1: Despite his many criticisms of the Olympic Prison, when Professor Hall thinks back on the nineteen eighty Winter Olympics, like many folks, he also holds warm memories of the glory of the nineteen eighty Games in Lake Placid. Being from the area certainly helps, since it was nearly impossible for a kid not to get wept up in all the Olympic excitement.
00:42:03
Speaker 7: Growing up in an area that hosted the Olympics twice, I was exposed to that history.
00:42:08
Speaker 1: Growing up.
00:42:09
Speaker 7: We even learned about the Olympics, the history of the Olympics in elementary school. I think we made with popsicle sticks built like replicas of the Lake Plastic facilities, a ski jump and the other facilities.
00:42:22
Speaker 1: Julia Herman and Courtney Bastian from the Lake Placid Olympic Museum. Also, both have personal histories and connections with the former Olympic facilities, and both are looking forward to this year's Winter Games. When asked, if a genie's wish were granted, which Olympic sports they'd wish to compete in, both women were quick to answer.
00:42:47
Speaker 5: Honestly, I think the aerial skiing is really cool.
00:42:51
Speaker 4: I think that's awesome.
00:42:52
Speaker 5: I loved watching Aileen Goo at the Beijing twenty twenty two Games.
00:42:56
Speaker 4: I think that's such an awesome sport.
00:42:58
Speaker 3: I'd probably pick two or form in bob sled so I don't have to push or anything and already be in the sled. Everyone else can drive, and I'm just kind of a passenger.
00:43:11
Speaker 1: Once the nineteen eighty Games concluded, after the joy and excitement and triumph of humanity, the flame went out, but the fences and guard towers stayed. The Olympic Village was transformed into a federal prison.
00:43:26
Speaker 7: There were protests outside the White House the day the prison opened in September of nineteen eighty and in fact attacking President Carter for not doing more to stop the facility from becoming a prison, and there were protesters inside the prison the public was invited in. I mean, this is a part of our history that were often not exposed to, is that when prisons open, they had like almost like a furniture store was opening. You'd have a big grand opening and catered lunch and music, and people would come in and give speeches and drink a cocktail and have a good time. And they had an opening ceremony for this facility, and members have stopped because it was open to the public. Protesters showed up, but they were very respectful, and they held their signs quietly, and they weren't as sported out. But they realized, even ones who attended that small protest that they realized, like it's over. We can't really do anything at this point, but they had to be there to bear witness.
00:44:25
Speaker 1: By that point, there wasn't much hope left among the locals to attempt to block the prison from opening. They'd largely accepted it was a done deal. Once FCI Raybrook was filled with prisoners. You may be wondering what happened to the discothech, the movie theater, the pinball and the video games, Like did the guards get to keep them or did they remove it all and give them to locals.
00:44:48
Speaker 5: So the disco tech became the prison chapel and psychology offices. The dining hall became a work services building, and the athletes shopping center and became, I believe the receiving warehouse where and make goods were inspected.
00:45:03
Speaker 1: A disco turning into a chapel. Somehow, this seems very symbolic of what was about to go down in Reagan's America, which was just coming into view with the former Hollywood actors crushing victory over the former peanut farmer Jimmy Carter later that same year, and boom, just like that, suddenly the seventies were very much over. A new world was dawning. So whatever became of FCI Raybrook, the so called Olympic prison once it opened, Did it actually transform the region? Did it provide those good jobs that were promised? And how did the new federal prison affect the community of Lake Placid after the Winter Games were nothing more than a set of warm memories. Professor Hall has his opinion veiled in sarcasm.
00:45:58
Speaker 7: I tipped my hat to Lake Placid Olympic organizers and their allies because they did an excellent job of obfuscating what this facility was going to be used for and successfully hiding it from large swaths of the public for the past nearly fifty years. So you sort of have to give credit where it's due to people who are engaging in subterfuge when they're successful for that long. And so it's too bad too, because it's still there, it still operates. Many of the region's other prisons have closed. This one has survived and it's been as I pointed out in the book, and folks can read if they would like, there's been a lot of violence and death in that facility, and a lot of what the STOP organization worried about did come to pass.
00:46:49
Speaker 1: But that isn't something that many of the locals in the Lake Placid region wrestle with anymore. Since the federal prison is located somewhat out of sight and thus it's out of mind, locals like Julia and Courtney almost never see the prison in their day to day lives.
00:47:07
Speaker 3: It is eight miles outside of Lake Placid, hiding towards Saranac Lake, and you don't pass.
00:47:13
Speaker 4: It like you can't see it from the road.
00:47:15
Speaker 3: You see a sign and there's like a lot of security to get even into those regions.
00:47:21
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's not in our community.
00:47:22
Speaker 3: It's basically in Raybrook, which is its own little hub, which is very small. There's like DC gas station, love that, but yeah, we don't come across it like Ever.
00:47:37
Speaker 1: Despite the fact that FCI Raybrook is not an ugliness that locals are forced to think about, it's strange legacy does still inform the modern movement against mass incarceration. The so called Olympic Prison has become a compelling lesson from our not so distant past.
00:47:57
Speaker 7: It should be a cautionary tail for how we organize our criminal legal system. If we want people who are in prison or in jail to come out on the other side and lead productive lives, don't brutalize them, don't put them in environments that are going to make their conditions worse.
00:48:20
Speaker 1: FCI Raybrook is still there, still operational. The Olympic Flame has long since moved on, hosted by new sites. The game's return every four years carrying the same promises of legacy and renewal. What gets built in their wake and who pays the price is still an open question.
00:48:43
Speaker 7: I hope that more people, especially around the twenty twenty six winter Olympics. I hope that more people learn about sort of the costs of these large sporting events.
00:48:51
Speaker 1: That said, when the Olympic flame was lit at the opening ceremony at this year's Winter Games, Professor Hall was surely tuned in to witness the spectacle in all its glory.
00:49:04
Speaker 7: I guess as a historian, historian's ruin everything that most people enjoy. I can't really ignore the costs that will be paid for the television show which is the Olympics. And I hope that we can have a world where we have athletic competitions, but ones that are more ethical and more humane. So I'm not against athletic competition, but if we can find ways to not hurt people in the process, then we should do that.
00:49:39
Speaker 8: Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. The show is hosted by Zaren Burnett, Danish Sports and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Zaren Burnett, editing and sound design by Jesse Niswanger, mixing and mastering by Jesse Niswanker. For School of Humans, producers are Amelia Brock and Eily's Paris. Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Quintonia for today's episode. Executive producers are Jason English.
00:50:12
Speaker 2: And Virginia Prescott.
00:50:14
Speaker 8: Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: Every four years, a small army of laborers works for months, if not years, to construct the mini venues needed for the Olympic Games. A site is selected, blueprints are drawn up, money is allocated, and then, long before the teams of international competitors ever show up, construction workers descend, building inspiring sites where Olympic glory will be won. When the Games are over, those same newly constructed venues are often torn down or left to sit abandoned, but not always some find a second purpose. For instance, for the two thousand and eight Summer Olympics hosted in Beijing, the Chinese built this visually astounding venue nicknamed the water Cube. The site hosted many aquatic events like swimming, diving, and synchronized swimming. Now it's a popular water park for the people of China. As for the stadium for ice skating and ice hockey built for the nineteen twenty eight and nineteen forty eight Winter Olympics in Saint Mauritz, Switzerland, well it eventually became a private residence owned by one man, Rolf Sachs, and the same site that hosted the Olympic opening ceremony. He later turned into a private garden United States has hosted the Olympics more than any other country. For the summer Games, there was the nineteen oh four Saint Louis Games and the nineteen thirty two Los Angeles Games, and again in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty four and finally in Atlanta in nineteen ninety six. For the Winter Games, Lake Tahoe in nineteen sixty, Salt Lake City in two thousand and two, and one sleep hosted it twice, a small town in upstate New York called Lake Placid in nineteen thirty two and nineteen eighty. The USA holds another Olympic record as the host in nineteen eighty four the Lake Placid Winter Games. The Olympic village that was constructed to house the many international Olympians was later transformed into one of the most controversial structures in the olympics near three thousand year history, leading to protests that would follow for years. Welcome to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host Zarin Burnett and this is the Olympic Prison.
00:02:58
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Very SPECIALTS Episodes. My name is Jason English. I am usually joined here at the top by my co host Zaron Burnett and Danish Schwartz podcast legends both. It's just me today, but I'm going to get you back out to Zaren in a second. I was just going through our story ideas file. This is a mix of half baked concepts, amazing facts, and more than a fair share of non sequiturs. There's some great Olympics facts here. We aren't going to be using any of these as jumping off points for very special episodes during this Olympic cycle, but I figured I could share a few here. In nineteen thirty two, Brazil couldn't afford to send its athletes to the Olympics in la so they loaded their ship with coffee and sold it along the way. We should probably have done that as an episode. Put a pin in that. Until twenty twenty eight, tug of war and croquet used to be Olympic sports. I think they should bring both of those back. At the nineteen twelve Olympics in Stockholm, future General George S. Patten finished fifth in the first ever modern pentathlon. The nineteen seventy six Winter Olympics were awarded to Denver, but Colorado voters rejected the public financing of the games and Innsbruck had to host instead, and between nineteen twelve and nineteen forty eight, art competitions were a part of the Olympics. Medals were awarded for architecture, music, painting, and sculpture. We actually did do an episode about this during the Paris Games in twenty twenty four. I will link to that in the show notes. Another question that always comes up, what do they do with the structures built for the Olympic Games. For that, I'm going to throw it on out to Zaren.
00:04:50
Speaker 1: Located in upstate New York, surrounded by snow capped mountains and the idyllic forests of the Adirondacks. In nineteen eighty the town of Lake Plas It was a small, unassuming mountain town of just about twenty seven hundred people. Its scale was a key reason the Olympic Planning Committee eyed it as a host for the Winter Games. Another reason was snow, copious amounts of snow.
00:05:18
Speaker 3: Lake Placid is known as the Winter sports Capital of the World. That is our tagline and that's how it's marketed. And it goes back before the nineteen thirty two Games, back with the Grand Hotels when people were coming up here romanticizing the worlderness and getting out of the.
00:05:35
Speaker 4: Cities for vacations.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: They came up here and it's like a snowy tundra in the winter time up here, and people are coming. They're like, Okay, what are we going to do? Like, we need some kind of entertainment, recreation. So that's when winter sports got brought in.
00:05:50
Speaker 1: That's Courtney Bastion, the director of the Lake Placid Olympic Museum. Courtney was kind enough to speak with us about Lake Placid's long and storied play in Olympic history. The nineteen thirty two Winter Olympics is a point of pride for Lake Placid and the surrounding Adirondacks area, which played host to the international community. Lake Placid had another advantage. There was also a fine collection of housing options ready made for the international athletes who would come to compete.
00:06:23
Speaker 4: During the time of nineteen thirty two.
00:06:25
Speaker 3: It was also the Grand Hotel era, so we had a lot of Grand hotels in Lake Placid. So one of them, for example, was the Lake Placid Club, founded by Melville Dewey of the Dewey decimal system.
00:06:38
Speaker 1: The Dewey family was the chief reason the Winter Games came to Lake Placid.
00:06:43
Speaker 3: Godfrey Dewey, Melville's son, was really interested in bringing the Olympics to Lake Placid. He went to Saint Maurt's the second Winter Olympic Games to learn all he could about hosting and presenting an Olympic bed.
00:06:56
Speaker 1: That bid was a complete success, and as a result, on April tenth, nineteen twenty nine, Lake Placid was awarded the third Olympic Winter Games.
00:07:06
Speaker 5: Once we were awarded that, you know, our small town approved all the bonds that it needed to build all the facilities.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: That's the Lake Placid Olympic Museum's Collections manager, Julia Hermann. Once it was official the Winter Games were coming to Lake Placid, the organizers faced a huge challenge, more like a global crisis. The stock market crashed in October of nineteen twenty nine. However, that historic financial collapse didn't stop tiny Lake Placid from investing huge sums of money in order to construct the many needed venues for the nineteen thirty two Winter Games. Luckily, snowy Lake Placid already did have some key infrastructure.
00:07:51
Speaker 3: Lake nineteen oh four nineteen oh five was the first time winter sports came and then the clubs started developing their own winter sports teams. They built the first stop slides and ski jumps as part of the club's identity and recreation and promoting the club itself.
00:08:08
Speaker 4: And then we get into the Olympics.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: Rather unsurprisingly, and despite the financial challenge, the nineteen thirty two Games surpassed expectations. The Winter Olympics went off without a hitch. Seventeen nations, represented by two hundred and fifty two athletes, competed for gold. For the village of Lake Placid. The Games were largely a success. After the closing ceremony, the remote mountain town was left to pay off a modest deficit of roughly fifty two thousand dollars. That's not bad considering the Great Depression. Fast forward to the nineteen seventies, when the Olympic Committee was looking for the next spot for the Olympic Games, Lake Placid was at the top of the list of potential hosts. Again, here's Julia Herman.
00:09:00
Speaker 5: Part of it was sustainability. You know, we already had some of the venues, we just had to update them. And it was also the fact that we had already kind of been through the ringer on how to host an Olympics how to put a bit together.
00:09:11
Speaker 1: As Courtney Bastian explains, the residents of Lake Placid were eager to have the Olympics back in nineteen eighty.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: They were proud in wanting to revive our legacy and stay involved in winter sports on a global stage.
00:09:28
Speaker 1: The Olympics were still recovering from the seventy two Munich Games when there was a bloody terrorist attack. The committee believed that since the small, sleepy New York village of Lake Placid was far removed from any major population center, it would be a perfectly safe location for the many international athletes.
00:09:49
Speaker 5: And not a lot of host cities have the honor of being a two time host city, so having that honor again in nineteen eighty was great for this great for this town.
00:10:00
Speaker 1: When you see, Lake Placid had this one other, not small problem to overcome. The era of the grand hotels had long since passed. While Lake Placid certainly had the facilities for athletes to compete the ski jumps, the bob sled runs, and ice rinks when it was awarded the nineteen eighty Winter Games, what it didn't have was anywhere for the roughly eleven hundred Olympians and their coaches to sleep. Figuring that out fell to one man, Republican Congressman representing upstate New York, Robert McEwan. He lobbied the federal government for the money needed to construct a new Olympic village. After many false starts, finally he was able to secure twenty eight million dollars for the creation of the new facility. And then there was one other, not small problem. The federal government agreed to put up the money, but the money came with strings. When the games ended, the new facility had to become a permanent structure, one with some practical secondary purpose.
00:11:07
Speaker 5: And given the amount of money that was given for the Olympic village, I definitely think they didn't want to see it so empty.
00:11:15
Speaker 4: So that was why there was that contingency.
00:11:17
Speaker 3: With that a lot of locals, officials, and citizens.
00:11:21
Speaker 4: They initially proposed.
00:11:23
Speaker 3: Other uses for the facilities, such as an athletic training center, youth hostels, affordable housing, college dormitories.
00:11:33
Speaker 1: Well, those were all good ideas. None of those were approved. Instead, a different idea for a secondary usage won the day, but none.
00:11:42
Speaker 3: Of those options offered as much Federal assistance in funding as a federal prison would have.
00:11:49
Speaker 1: That's right, a federal prison. The agreement was that the federal government would build an Olympic village for Lake Placid. Once the games were over, the small town would hand the former Olympic village back over to the Feds and they would transform it into a new federal prison.
00:12:09
Speaker 3: During this era too, there was federal prison overcrowding also, and the federal government was looking for places to build more prisons and for prison expansion. So we're now looking at the nineteen eighty we need housing for athletes, governments looking for expanding on their federal prisons, and the Olympic villages in the regulations for security were almost equivalent to a medium security facility.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: Thus the idea of the Olympic prison was born. Obviously, turning an Olympic village into a prison was a controversial idea.
00:12:51
Speaker 5: If you just look at newspapers or even like New York Times articles from like outside of just the at around ACKs, I mean, you could tell there were reactions and they were concerned about the idea of housing elite athletes and something that was clearly designed to be a prison.
00:13:06
Speaker 1: Afterwards, the story of the potential Olympic prison soon moved from headlines to the streets, and the pushback begins. After this break, in the nineteen seventies, America was once again mired in a severe economic downturn, not as bad as the Great Depression, but the explosion of stagflation and the widening gyre of economic recession crippled the country. It also limited the imaginations of the powers that be. It made them shy to embrace big new ideas. In fact, things got so bad that in nineteen seventy five, President Gerald Ford refused to loan New York City the money it's so desperately needed to avoid immediate bankruptcy. The financial center of the world was set to go belly up. As The New York Times reported in nineteen seventy five.
00:14:09
Speaker 6: Treasury Secretary of William E. Simon declared that mister Ford's response to New York should be regarded as a signal to the city that it take the extremely difficult political actions it must take to put its fiscal and financial house in order.
00:14:25
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, one year earlier, the tiny upstate New York village of Lake Placid had been awarded the nineteen eighty Olympic Games. It sure seemed as if Lake Placid only ever got to play host to the Winter Games during a global financial collapse. What tough luck for the tiny mountain town. But this is how and why a rather strange idea like turning the Olympic Village into a federal prison made perfect sense at the time. The prison was billed as a cost efficient solution to an expensive problem. With money very much on their minds, the federal government and the Olympic Committee pushed ahead with their plans to build the Olympic Village and repurpose it as a federal prison. But they kept their plans hush hush because they knew if their plans ever leaked, activists and protesters would surely step up to fight back and stop the so called Olympic prison, which is exactly what happened. The plans did leak, and as soon as the plans became public, an editor from the local Lake Placid News wrote a story about how he couldn't recall any public hearings or community consultations for this new federal prison. A local magazine called frying Pan published an article that called into question the secretive process of approval for construction. It criticized how the public comment period and the environmental review process were both seemingly shielded from the public. The article stayed that quote, this whole shady deal was pulled off because of the concept of secondary use. Such is the fine art of politics. That same article went on to say that quote, had the regular procedure been followed, there would have been a flap before any groundbreaking.
00:16:20
Speaker 7: Instead of going through a regular appropriation process in Congress, where there would be committee hearings and there would be an opportunity to mark up the bill and then send it to the House floor and send it over to the Senate floor and have real debate, what Congress did was simply take the fiscal year in nineteen seventy seven budget that had already been enacted and reprogrammed the necessary funding that had already been enacted for other projects and redirected it to the project in Raybrook. So and this was done without public hearings, It was done without public oversight. And I'll just say this completely anti democratic process was used to get this project bill.
00:17:00
Speaker 1: That's professor Jeff Hall. He's the author of the excellent book A Prison in the Woods about the history of prisons in New York and the construction of the Federal Correction Institution Raybrook, aka the Olympic Prison. As Professor Hall points out, the heated protests against the Olympic Prison largely came from media outlets and folks who lived outside of the Lake Placid area. At least at first.
00:17:27
Speaker 7: The local press was in love with the idea. And this is something that you see repeatedly during this period of what we call mass incarceration in northern New York in the late twentieth century. The local press was concerned mainly with the economic impact. Many people in the area thought, Okay, we'll have an Olympic village. We'll have this federal prison. Afterward, we'll have some jobs there.
00:17:53
Speaker 1: Much like the rest of America, Lake Placid was mired in an economic malaise, which explains why at first first the new federal prison was seen as a lucrative source of jobs and economic stability. It would be a financial boon for those months when snow didn't blanket the ground and transform the area into a money making winter wonderland. But once the unvarnished realities of the project came into full view, public opinion shifted.
00:18:24
Speaker 7: Once the environmental damage became apparent. There was a shift in how the story was being covered, and I think that shift also reflected public opinion of the project.
00:18:36
Speaker 1: So that was one concern environmental impact. But there was another.
00:18:41
Speaker 7: Six months later, when the construction began without any notification to local residents that the construction was starting. Then you started to see local residents turn against the project in large numbers, mainly based on the effects that this project was going to have on the quality of the neighborhood where they lived.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: That was a major concern, how would a federal prison affect the idyllic Adirondack wilderness. To overcome this environmental hurdle, the federal government ended up buying a piece of land in nearby Raybrook. The site was located across the street from an old tuberculosis hospital.
00:19:22
Speaker 7: It was owned by the state, but it was mostly forested land that was used by hikers and fishermen for recreational activities. So what ended up happening, which I described in that chapter of my book, is that the construction was extremely destructive to the local environment, to the wetlands surrounding the property, to the local freshwater supplies, to the wildlife populations, and there was very little recourse for local residents or even for people who were concerned with environmental quality, because the state could step in. The Olympic organizers, of course, wanted the facility built.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: And so in the summer and fall of nineteen seventy seven.
00:20:03
Speaker 7: The project is underway, the land is being cleared, the buildings are going to soon be built. The public opinion and the news media have basically turned against the project.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: A protest group formed. It was called STOP, short for Stop the Olympic Prison. Stop wasn't a brand, it was an instruction. Stop didn't just oppose a prison. They challenged how it was approved, where it was built, and who it would ultimately hold. STOP members took to the streets. They lined the road for the Olympic Torch runs, and they held signs declaring that Olympic Torch equals freedom and Olympic Prison equals slavery.
00:20:49
Speaker 7: So STOP was really organized. It was a loose coalition of churches and civil rights organizations, a lot of individuals, a lot of clergy and intellectuals across the state of New York and including in the Lake Placid area in northern New York State and its message, which for the late nineteen seventies sort of previewed a lot of anti prison organizing that would come in the eighties, nineties, and early part of this century. Its message initially was mainly focused on the horrors that had been experienced at Attica in nineteen seventy one, where there was this horrific, deadly crackdown on a legitimate uprising of incarcerated people against the terrible conditions they experienced inside the state prison, and there was intense concern among folks who affiliated with STOP that this new federal prison in Raybrook would eventually replicate the same conditions.
00:21:54
Speaker 1: The dangers and doom of mass incarceration were not something many people focused on at the time, not at least prior to the prison uprising at Attica in nineteen seventy one, when the governor of New York sent in armed soldiers to put down a prison revolt. The result forty three men died, thirty three inmates, and ten prison guards. In the following years, Attica became a major talking point in terms of what goes down behind prison walls in America. But not only that, Americans were also wrestling with what kind of country we'd become. This was motivated by the revelations that came out of the Watergate scandaled in nineteen seventy four and seventy five. Altogether, this general distrust of the federal government and the eye opening violence of Attica merged in the hearts and minds of protesters and provided language to wigld against the federal government and their Olympic prison plans. There was another major concern for STOP and the affiliated protesters, a concern that would ring familiar to listeners today.
00:23:04
Speaker 7: In the United States in the nineteen seventies. By nineteen seventy six seventy seven, the majority of people incarstrated in the United States came from African American and Latino communities in the United States, and mainly impoverished people of color, mainly as a result of anti narcotics laws and straight up corruption from police departments that landed increasingly large numbers of poor people of color in prisons.
00:23:32
Speaker 1: This was a real and tangible and tragic outcome that the protesters felt they could leverage to bring greater attention to the construction of the so called Olympic Prison.
00:23:45
Speaker 7: Many members of STOP were pointing this out and saying, hey, like we're going to house elite athletes in this facility, we can use this as an opportunity to publicize this dirty secret of the United Lace States that we like to portray ourselves as so pure and so superior to other countries. But we're going to house elite Olympic athletes, mostly white, inside a facility that will someday incarcery and likely torture or men of color. And so I think wisely, like any activist organization would, they took advantage of the moment and they're like, Hey, this is a moment where we will get attention. This is something people will pay attention to.
00:24:29
Speaker 1: There was another concern. Some locals feared that the new inmates at the prison would have families, and those family members would come to visit. Some might even move to town.
00:24:40
Speaker 7: You had this radio call in show where the host spent an hour taking calls from people, and that was the focus was will their relatives move here? Will their relatives move here and apply for Medicaid? Will they move here and apply for snap benefits? Will they move here and put their kids in the local schools? Will they generate solid waste? Will they cause crime?
00:25:08
Speaker 1: There was also one other super important angle to consider in terms of protesting the Olympic prison. It came down to three words, the Cold War. Since the Cold War was very much still a thing in the nineteen seventies, obvious comparisons were made between how the USA and the Soviet Union handled the question of what to do with an Olympic village after their Olympic games were done and over, And it was highly embarrassing for the USA when.
00:25:40
Speaker 7: And it became known what the Soviet Union was going to do with its Olympic housing for nineteen eighty when it hosted the Summer Olympics in Moscow, they were building a brand new Olympic village that was going to be turned into apartments. So there was this strident contrast, right the United States was in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Soviates are building apartments for people to live in after the Olympics. We're hosting the Olympics, and we're building an athlete's village that will become a prison. So it didn't really make the United States look too good.
00:26:13
Speaker 1: By this point, the protests had moved from the streets into a surprising place, church services. The Civil rights era had galvanized churches and religious leaders and drew them into the fight for human rights. Now they had a new battlefield on which to fight prison reform.
00:26:32
Speaker 7: This was time when churches were becoming more involved, especially in the North. We're becoming more involved in social activism around racial discrimination and discrimination against the poor. I mean, churches had been heavily involved in the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties, and I think for many churches in the North, this was sort of a natural progression for them to sort of identify a new area which was squarely within the realm of civil rights that they could get involved in. So I think that many clergy in Northern New York did sort of jump on the stop bandwagon. But I think it's also important to point out that the Catholic Church in Northern New York, which is the single largest Christian denomination in that area, was officially in favor of this project. The local bishop of the diocese encouraged his clergy to give sermons and explain why the project was important for the area.
00:27:33
Speaker 1: While the Catholic Church officially supported construction of the Olympic Prison, not all of the local Catholic religious leaders followed the party line.
00:27:43
Speaker 7: There were some Catholic clergy who did join stop, but many did sort of follow the diocese in supporting the projects. But I do think for most clergy and for most sort of church leaders in the area, this was sort of seen as a natural progression of work they had previously participated in terms of promoting civil rights.
00:28:03
Speaker 1: In order to bolster local support for the prison's construction, the Catholic Church argued that the prison would actually improve the lives of prisoners. That argument came down to one word, overcrowding. The Catholic Church put forward the idea that quote, the nation cannot neglect one of the larger problems of our existing penal system, namely the overcrowding of our prisons. Convicted felons are also fellow human beings who deserve humane living conditions fully as much as other members of society. To deny therefore, the need for humane incarceration in institutions is cruel. Again, this was a result of the long shadow of the bloody violence of Attica. When he discusses this era of prison reform, Professor Hall holds strong opinions about the prisons, their conditions, and their downstream effects. For one, he's seen firsthand how life inside a prison affects a person.
00:29:08
Speaker 7: My father worked as a correction officer in one of the state's largest prisons, which was called Clinton Correctional Facility, and I always had a curiosity about his job. He seemed to hate his job. He seemed like a pretty unhappy person.
00:29:23
Speaker 1: Not only that, his father also quite literally brought his work home.
00:29:28
Speaker 7: He actually brought incarcerated people to our house. And is actually the first time I ever encountered an African American person was when he brought a van filled with incarcerated people to our house while he was on his way to New York City. And also, just as I got older, I knew that there were all these other prisons in the area where I grew up, but I didn't really know anything about how they got there, who was involved, why they ended up where they ended up.
00:29:56
Speaker 1: Professor Hall's curiosity about incarcerated people as well as prison guards like his father, blossomed into a lifelong interest in life inside prison and how it affects life outside prison, which raises a secondary question, how would the Olympic prison affect the community with so many prison guards coming home after witnessing or participating in the traumas that occur inside the prison walls where they work.
00:30:23
Speaker 7: My father suffered from severe mental illness, from severe depression and anxiety that my mother informed me began right when he started working for the corrections department, and that many of his colleagues also took these jobs and then, for a variety of reasons, traumas they either participated in or witnessed or experienced while they were working in these facilities, suffered severe psychological damage and to the point where I really only knew my father when he was severely mentally ill. And my father died by suicide, and I sort of attribute that to his work in the correction system.
00:31:11
Speaker 1: When asked if he and his father ever discussed FCI Raybrooke aka the Olympic Prison, professor Hall recalls how his father's line of thinking about it changed and evolved over time.
00:31:25
Speaker 7: Definitely, we discussed FCI Raybrook. He did sort of come to understand the foolishness of all this prison construction, and I think he also, by the end of his life, had connected the traumas he witnessed and experienced and participated in to his own wellbeing. I think he sort of understood the connection by that point. But that's something that state federal correctional leaders don't like talking about. Incarcerated people dying in prison, dying in jail workers, dying of heart attacks at very early ages, or dying by suicide. These are issues we just don't talk about, and because we don't talk about them, for a lot of people, they don't exist.
00:32:03
Speaker 1: Remember, Lake Placid is tiny, which is twenty seven hundred or so people, with about two hundred jobs from the prison facility. That means about eight percent of the population would be working at this facility. This begs the question, how would all the pain and trauma inside the prison bleed out into the wintertime wonderland and affect this picturesque community.
00:32:29
Speaker 7: Nobody talks about that. Those prisons that were built there were sold as engines of economic vitality for dying communities, and so anything that could call into question the value of those facilities is simply covered up, and the mental health crisis in prisons among everyone involved and their families is a real thing.
00:32:54
Speaker 1: In a story published at the time by Common Wheel magazine, the writer posed series of all the many compelling questions to ask about the so called Olympic prison and I quote, would we allow American athletes to live in a Russian prison at the nineteen eighty Games? Is it worth at all to place inmates three hundred miles from family to give a depressed area a few jobs? Is such an arrangement justified? Will the TV programs on ABC in nineteen eighty be worth the macabre prison background? What is America's sole worth? When Professor Hall hears those same high minded questions, his reply is rather trenchant. Those questions all remind him of today and.
00:33:44
Speaker 7: Specifically how little progress we've made. We think about the coming World Cup in the United States next year, and more so the Los Angeles Olympics in twenty twenty eight. Stories that are underreported, such as the forced displacement of people who are unhoused or who are living in unstable housing situations in areas that will be on television or that are adjacent to athletic facilities, that will happen in the United States. So the words of Commonweal magazine in the late nineteen seventies, when the Olympic Prison was being planned and being built, Yes, they resonate today because we're doing the same things, and it seems like there is a larger share of our population today that is also okay with this, Like so that if we were going to build a prison to house athletes in twenty twenty eight, that there would be a sizeable chunk of the population that would be like, you know what, no problem, why not.
00:34:51
Speaker 1: We like to think that as time passes we become a better nation, one filled with citizens who've learned from the past and are made or for it. Professor Hall indicates that may not be the case, at least in terms of how we view prisons, whether it's an Olympic prison or a regular prison. For now, let's take a break, listen to some advertisements, and when we're back, it'll be time for the opening ceremony of the nineteen eighty Winter Olympics. As the nineteen seventies became history, despite all the protests from the locals and the Olympians alike, despite international critics and all the controversy, despite the efforts of local clergy and celebrities like actor Ozzie Davis, who lent his stardom to the stop movement, the Olympic prison moved forward. Soon after the Olympic village opened, the Olympians arrived to fill it, and you better believe some of them realized immediately what this place really was. Julia Hermann recalls that members of the Soviet men's ice hockey team were shocked.
00:36:09
Speaker 4: What Fatissoff said.
00:36:10
Speaker 5: As a young man, you think it's going to be this wonderful celebration as in the Olympics, and instead you're treated to a barbed wire prison and watch towers. We slept in prison cells. Boris Kalov said it was a terrible living arrangement, just terrible. No other Olympics has launched us so poorly. The conditions were less than minimal, with barbed wire fences and thin blankets, and then Sergei Makarov had said it was atrocious.
00:36:34
Speaker 1: For the eleven hundred athletes. The newly built complex had nine hundred and thirty seven rooms, or as they'd later be called cells. Each room was roughly eight feet by thirteen feet and was intended to house two Olympians. The cells had cinderblock walls and prison doors.
00:36:54
Speaker 5: The prison doors were very heavy, so someone woke up at six am and slammed those doors then the whole building woke up, so a lot of the European countries were not very happy with it. Some delegations even refused to let their athletes stay on site, calling the rooms claustrophobic and jail cell like, So they actually rented out some hotel rooms or some homes within Lake Placid to house their athletes during the games.
00:37:18
Speaker 1: But for the ones who weren't so lucky, who had to stay at the Olympic Village outside of the confines of their prison cell rooms, what were the rest of the accommodations like.
00:37:28
Speaker 5: The Olympic Village was designed as a campus style, which is also a prison architecture design. So this type of design features a series of separate and freestanding buildings that are arranged around the central area that resemble a college campus. You had your dormitories, and then you might have like your student center, your rec center, that kind of thing.
00:37:48
Speaker 1: If you focused on just the amenities and you ignored the two eleven foot tall perimeter fences, the guard towers, and the cinder block rooms with barred windows and the little peaks slot in the door, you could almost forget that the complex was intended to be a prison. Almost the amenities included two.
00:38:09
Speaker 5: Three hundred and fifty seat cafeterias, a medical clinic, an entertainment center that had a theater, a cinema, a discotheque, a library, a full service bank, a post office, a shopping center, a game room, a transportation center, and a.
00:38:23
Speaker 1: Chapel as well. The Olympians also were provided star studded entertainment in the Olympic Village.
00:38:30
Speaker 4: Fun fact I always liked to throw in.
00:38:31
Speaker 5: Dean Warwick actually performed live at this Olympic village for the athletes.
00:38:35
Speaker 1: There was also a shopping center that had souvenirs from around the world and an arcade.
00:38:41
Speaker 5: The arcade was also very popular with the athletes. They had just classic games from the eighties, like Space Invaders. They had pinball machines which were very very popular pool tables.
00:38:56
Speaker 1: The nineteen eighty Winter Olympics opening ceremony took place on February thirteenth, nineteen eighty, and it very much captured the spirit of the times in America.
00:39:05
Speaker 5: It was an outdoor opening ceremony, definitely a lot fancier than nineteen thirty two. We had synchronized skaters and we had a live Orchestra, and then we had the Parade of Nations of course, so we had thirty seven nations in nineteen eighty, so considerably bigger than nineteen thirty two.
00:39:23
Speaker 1: The American athletes arrived for the Parade of Nations dressed as one of America's favorite symbols of its past, the cowboy.
00:39:31
Speaker 5: They were all ducked out in Levi's because Levi's was the outfitter for teen USA that year. So they had a classic sherline jacket on with a cowboy hat, Levi's, Jean's cowboy boots.
00:39:41
Speaker 4: And a plaid button up.
00:39:43
Speaker 5: And they entered in and for the torch relay, doctor Charles Curve Arizona was unanimously.
00:39:50
Speaker 4: Selected by his fellow torch bearers to light.
00:39:52
Speaker 5: The cauldron and so he let the cauldron doves who were released, and it was just this very pomp and circumstance, exciting event harolding in at the start of the nineteen eighty Games.
00:40:02
Speaker 1: To commemorate that special moment, the Olympic Museum in Lake Placid has a display of the opening ceremony outfits and it's a big hit with visitors.
00:40:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, they love the cowboy hats. I think it's very Americana blue jeans. We get a lot of positive feedback from visitors who get a kick out of the cowboy hots.
00:40:22
Speaker 4: For sure.
00:40:23
Speaker 1: Looking back, it all very much feels like the dawn of Reagan's America. When many folks think back to the nineteen eighty Winter Olympics, the standout moment is the victory of the US men's hockey team over the Soviet Union's men's hockey team, known as the Miracle on ice, This was a defining moment in the mythos of the Cold War.
00:40:50
Speaker 5: The United States wasn't expected to even make it to the metal round in the ice Hockey Tournament in nineteen eighty, but they defied all odds and they played the Soviet Union in not tech the quote unquote gold medal game, but they did play them, and they defeated them four to three.
00:41:06
Speaker 1: That magical moment was also made far more memorable thanks to legendary broadcaster.
00:41:12
Speaker 4: With Al Michaels.
00:41:13
Speaker 5: Of course, the famous call do you believe in miracles? Kind of cementing that as one of.
00:41:17
Speaker 4: The most famous sports moments in history.
00:41:19
Speaker 5: I mean that happens here in Lake Placid, so it resonates with a lot of our visitors, and especially the people who were alive when it happened, who come here as kind of like a pilgrimage in a way, like they have to come see it. All the hockey fans, all the hockey kids know what it is and they absolutely love it. So it's event we hold near and dear to our hearts here in Lake Placid.
00:41:38
Speaker 1: Despite his many criticisms of the Olympic Prison, when Professor Hall thinks back on the nineteen eighty Winter Olympics, like many folks, he also holds warm memories of the glory of the nineteen eighty Games in Lake Placid. Being from the area certainly helps, since it was nearly impossible for a kid not to get wept up in all the Olympic excitement.
00:42:03
Speaker 7: Growing up in an area that hosted the Olympics twice, I was exposed to that history.
00:42:08
Speaker 1: Growing up.
00:42:09
Speaker 7: We even learned about the Olympics, the history of the Olympics in elementary school. I think we made with popsicle sticks built like replicas of the Lake Plastic facilities, a ski jump and the other facilities.
00:42:22
Speaker 1: Julia Herman and Courtney Bastian from the Lake Placid Olympic Museum. Also, both have personal histories and connections with the former Olympic facilities, and both are looking forward to this year's Winter Games. When asked, if a genie's wish were granted, which Olympic sports they'd wish to compete in, both women were quick to answer.
00:42:47
Speaker 5: Honestly, I think the aerial skiing is really cool.
00:42:51
Speaker 4: I think that's awesome.
00:42:52
Speaker 5: I loved watching Aileen Goo at the Beijing twenty twenty two Games.
00:42:56
Speaker 4: I think that's such an awesome sport.
00:42:58
Speaker 3: I'd probably pick two or form in bob sled so I don't have to push or anything and already be in the sled. Everyone else can drive, and I'm just kind of a passenger.
00:43:11
Speaker 1: Once the nineteen eighty Games concluded, after the joy and excitement and triumph of humanity, the flame went out, but the fences and guard towers stayed. The Olympic Village was transformed into a federal prison.
00:43:26
Speaker 7: There were protests outside the White House the day the prison opened in September of nineteen eighty and in fact attacking President Carter for not doing more to stop the facility from becoming a prison, and there were protesters inside the prison the public was invited in. I mean, this is a part of our history that were often not exposed to, is that when prisons open, they had like almost like a furniture store was opening. You'd have a big grand opening and catered lunch and music, and people would come in and give speeches and drink a cocktail and have a good time. And they had an opening ceremony for this facility, and members have stopped because it was open to the public. Protesters showed up, but they were very respectful, and they held their signs quietly, and they weren't as sported out. But they realized, even ones who attended that small protest that they realized, like it's over. We can't really do anything at this point, but they had to be there to bear witness.
00:44:25
Speaker 1: By that point, there wasn't much hope left among the locals to attempt to block the prison from opening. They'd largely accepted it was a done deal. Once FCI Raybrook was filled with prisoners. You may be wondering what happened to the discothech, the movie theater, the pinball and the video games, Like did the guards get to keep them or did they remove it all and give them to locals.
00:44:48
Speaker 5: So the disco tech became the prison chapel and psychology offices. The dining hall became a work services building, and the athletes shopping center and became, I believe the receiving warehouse where and make goods were inspected.
00:45:03
Speaker 1: A disco turning into a chapel. Somehow, this seems very symbolic of what was about to go down in Reagan's America, which was just coming into view with the former Hollywood actors crushing victory over the former peanut farmer Jimmy Carter later that same year, and boom, just like that, suddenly the seventies were very much over. A new world was dawning. So whatever became of FCI Raybrook, the so called Olympic prison once it opened, Did it actually transform the region? Did it provide those good jobs that were promised? And how did the new federal prison affect the community of Lake Placid after the Winter Games were nothing more than a set of warm memories. Professor Hall has his opinion veiled in sarcasm.
00:45:58
Speaker 7: I tipped my hat to Lake Placid Olympic organizers and their allies because they did an excellent job of obfuscating what this facility was going to be used for and successfully hiding it from large swaths of the public for the past nearly fifty years. So you sort of have to give credit where it's due to people who are engaging in subterfuge when they're successful for that long. And so it's too bad too, because it's still there, it still operates. Many of the region's other prisons have closed. This one has survived and it's been as I pointed out in the book, and folks can read if they would like, there's been a lot of violence and death in that facility, and a lot of what the STOP organization worried about did come to pass.
00:46:49
Speaker 1: But that isn't something that many of the locals in the Lake Placid region wrestle with anymore. Since the federal prison is located somewhat out of sight and thus it's out of mind, locals like Julia and Courtney almost never see the prison in their day to day lives.
00:47:07
Speaker 3: It is eight miles outside of Lake Placid, hiding towards Saranac Lake, and you don't pass.
00:47:13
Speaker 4: It like you can't see it from the road.
00:47:15
Speaker 3: You see a sign and there's like a lot of security to get even into those regions.
00:47:21
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's not in our community.
00:47:22
Speaker 3: It's basically in Raybrook, which is its own little hub, which is very small. There's like DC gas station, love that, but yeah, we don't come across it like Ever.
00:47:37
Speaker 1: Despite the fact that FCI Raybrook is not an ugliness that locals are forced to think about, it's strange legacy does still inform the modern movement against mass incarceration. The so called Olympic Prison has become a compelling lesson from our not so distant past.
00:47:57
Speaker 7: It should be a cautionary tail for how we organize our criminal legal system. If we want people who are in prison or in jail to come out on the other side and lead productive lives, don't brutalize them, don't put them in environments that are going to make their conditions worse.
00:48:20
Speaker 1: FCI Raybrook is still there, still operational. The Olympic Flame has long since moved on, hosted by new sites. The game's return every four years carrying the same promises of legacy and renewal. What gets built in their wake and who pays the price is still an open question.
00:48:43
Speaker 7: I hope that more people, especially around the twenty twenty six winter Olympics. I hope that more people learn about sort of the costs of these large sporting events.
00:48:51
Speaker 1: That said, when the Olympic flame was lit at the opening ceremony at this year's Winter Games, Professor Hall was surely tuned in to witness the spectacle in all its glory.
00:49:04
Speaker 7: I guess as a historian, historian's ruin everything that most people enjoy. I can't really ignore the costs that will be paid for the television show which is the Olympics. And I hope that we can have a world where we have athletic competitions, but ones that are more ethical and more humane. So I'm not against athletic competition, but if we can find ways to not hurt people in the process, then we should do that.
00:49:39
Speaker 8: Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. The show is hosted by Zaren Burnett, Danish Sports and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Zaren Burnett, editing and sound design by Jesse Niswanger, mixing and mastering by Jesse Niswanker. For School of Humans, producers are Amelia Brock and Eily's Paris. Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Quintonia for today's episode. Executive producers are Jason English.
00:50:12
Speaker 2: And Virginia Prescott.
00:50:14
Speaker 8: Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
