After talking with people in Auburn, I always asked if they had any dinner recommendations. This was, in part, because I was hungry after hours of research, but also because I think that dining establishments that are frequented by residents can provide insight into the town as a whole. In Auburn, one of the most common eating places to which I was referred was the Prison City Pub and Brewery.
A new addition to Auburn's collection of pubs, Prison City has quickly become an important part of the town. In 2017 its famous beer, Mass Riot IPA, was rated America's #1 IPA in Paste magazine, and it has since received recognition for its beers including Straight Outta Locash, Copper John, and Guavantanamo Bay. As is clear by the names of their beers, the entire restaurant is prison-themed; the color scheme is largely black and white (sometimes striped), the staff wear shirts that resemble jumpsuits, and the pub's logo includes a large lock and two smaller keys. For a town that largely denounces the label of "prison town," this pub seems to embrace the presence of the prison, and even profit from it.
I was initially very skeptical about eating at this pub because of its prison-theme. It felt a bit like eating here was an affront to the people that actually are inside the prison. My groupmates and I chose to visit anyways, thinking that this establishment would serve as a valuable space for understanding the ways that the prison is conceptualized in the town. While eating, my veggie burger, I turned my head just slightly to the left and saw these stadium-like lights in the distance. After a moment, I realized that these were the lights that lined the walls of the prison in order to make the prison yard more visible for the watchtower guards. While sitting in Prison City Pub, I was looking at the prison. The unsettling feeling that came over me upon making this connection spoiled my appetite. Soon after, one of my group mates came back from the bathroom and told the rest of us that the walls of the building were lined with prints of old images of the prison and its inmates. There was also a spot in the restaurant that people could stand in front of and take pictures that looked like mugshots. There was a collection of photos from past customers who posed, some smiling and others faking anger, hanging up on display.
I wanted to learn more about why the restaurant chose this theme, so I struck up conversation with a waiter there. He was a young Auburn native and had nothing but positive things to say about Prison City Pub and Brewery. He told me about their many award-winning beers and their contribution to downtown revitalization efforts. By his account, the pub attracted people form all around New York (and the U.S.) as it was recently added to well-known beer trails. When I asked him about the prison and the theme of the restaurant, however, his tone changed a bit. He quickly assured me that the restaurant and the prison were unrelated, and that the theme of the restaurant had nothing to do with its success -- it was strictly the beer.
In my conversations with other residents of Auburn, the notion that the restaurant and the prison are unrelated was repeatedly echoed. Once again, I found myself paying attention to the ways in which the prison was both highly visible and largely absent from people's perceptions of their town. Notably, the owners of the pub are not from Auburn. This, I think, suggests that the perception of Auburn as being a "prison city" or "prison town" is largely generalizable to outsiders of Auburn. To me, there is a clear link between the prison and the pub, but most residents of Auburn fail (or choose not to) see the connections.
However, one woman with whom I spoke mentioned that she no longer eats at this pub because "I’m eating my burger and I see these photos of people in pinstripes. It’s weird." I agree. This woman's discomfort with the theme of the restaurant suggests that perhaps she views the prison outside of its historical context, as an institution that is alive and well and, more importantly, negative to some extent. What is so shocking to me is the fact that her opinion is the exception, not the rule. Instead, there seems to be a sort of dissociative act that allows the people of Auburn to view their lives as being unrelated to and independent of the prison.
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