"The Rock" is officially golden. Thursday marked 50 years of tourists visiting Alcatraz Island, the notorious former maximum security federal prison-turned-national park.

NBC Bay Area got an insider's vantage point from a Bay Area author who was raised on the island while her father worked at the prison.

"By and large, it was a wonderful place to grow up. It was what I called a low-crime neighborhood," said Jolene Babyak of Oakland.