This dramatic 69-by-33-inch horizontal panorama documents the power plant at Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus—the facility that generated electricity for one of America’s largest prisons during its 150-year history of operation. The nearly six-foot width captures the industrial infrastructure that made incarceration of thousands possible.

Created in 1996, the work documents the penitentiary during its demolition period, capturing infrastructure that would soon vanish. Ohio Penitentiary opened in 1834 and closed in 1984, housing during its operation some of the nation’s most notorious criminals while subjecting inmates to conditions that critics consistently condemned as inhumane.

The power plant represents the prison’s industrial operation: generating electricity, providing heat, enabling the factory labor that kept inmates occupied while producing goods that sometimes competed unfairly with free workers. The prison as industrial operation required substantial infrastructure—power generation, water systems, laundry facilities—that this and other Ohio Penitentiary panoramas document.

The horizontal format emphasizes the power plant’s industrial scale, the composition capturing equipment and spaces comparable to municipal power facilities. The photo collage technique fragments this industrial interior while revealing the machinery that powered incarceration.

Ohio Penitentiary was demolished after Hayashi’s documentation, the site now occupied by a sports arena. The power plant and other support facilities vanished along with the cell blocks, leaving no physical evidence of the prison that stood there for a century and a half. This panorama preserves documentation of infrastructure whose demolition erased a troubled history.