The Story of AlcatrazINTRODUCTIONAlcatraz is a 22 acre island and according to geologists it is a submerged mountain peak and is made up mostly of rock and earth. The island itself is part of a group of islands found in the San Francisco Bay area. The name of the island comes from a Spanish explorer, Lieutenant Juan Manual de Ayala, and the ship's pilot, Jose de Canizarer, on August 12, 1775. He called it La Isla de los Alcatraces, in English it is Pelican Island. Alcatraz is precisely the singular form of Alcatraces. The owners of the island have changed three times in its history. First Spain owned it until 1822, then Mexico won its independence and claimed ownership and finally in 1846 Mexico/California went to war and then it became the property of the United States. On November 6, 1850, President Millard Filmore agreed to make Alcatraz official government property. It was supposed to be turned into a fortification to protect the city from hostile ships and the reason it was placed there was because it was located on an island in the middle of the bay, very strategic. There would be two batteries on either end of the island along with a two-story brick wall enclosing it all. Inside there would have been soldier barracks, guard houses, powder magazines and warehouses that would have been the backbone of Alcatraz. Alcatraz's official opening day was in December 1859 and it served two purposes, one as a fortification and the other as a prison. . The prison was there for servicemen who had committed various crimes. The prison held approximately 15-50 prisoners, but not all of them were military personnel, some were local citizens and politicians who had committed crimes of varying severity. The idea of ​​having a one-story prison is... halfway... saying that any surplus land would be theirs. So the city of San Francisco wanted the island so they could destroy what was theirs and start commercial development. However, this did not happen because there were too many protesters regarding the Alcatraz rescue. Then there were 4 or 5 years of lots of suggestions about what to do, but in 1972 the decision was made to turn it into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Alcatraz was now open to the public and today you can come down and take a tour to see where some of the most notorious criminals in the United States stayed. BIBLIOGRAPHY http://www.geocities.com/~marguerite_b/http://alcatraz.san -francisco.ca.us/http://www.sf50.com/alcatraz/http://library.thinkquest.org/ 21109/alcatraz/index.htm"Alcatraz." The World Book Encyclopedia. 94 ed. 1994."Alcatraz." Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th edition. 1985.