Hart Island

Over the years I've read a few stories in the NYT about Hart Island, New York City's potter's field. The island, much bigger than I thought at 131 acres, sits off the coast of City Island, a residential strip of homes, restaurants, marinas and sail making outfits on Long Island Sound. If Hart Island were to fly a flag, it would be a Bronx flag.

Most New Yorkers, even those born here, never heard of Hart Island, but there it sits, awaiting burials of the unidentified and unclaimed dead that have come to make New York City their final resting place.

The latest Hart Island story to appear is by Corey Kilgannon, who on Sunday in the Metropolitan section, keeps us up-to-date on who is going to manage Hart Island in he future. The baton is being passed to The Parks Department. The Department of Human Resources will be tasked with the burials.

Mr. Kilgannon is obviously a veteran NYT reporter who seems to get to cover the plum general interest assignments, from the exploits of Murf the Surf and the Star of India sapphire heist from the Museum of Natural History a lifetime ago, to the junk yards at Willetts Point, the ever diminishing junk yards at Willetts Point, right next to Citi Field in Queens County, an outer borough of New York City, or at least that's how the NYT often refers to it and its other three cousins, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

Mr. Kilgannon and the assembled photos take us on a black and white tour of the island, as it is now, with some vintage photos thrown in. The online edition has some color photos, as well as a video panorama of the island. And as if to prove that graffiti can find its way onto anything in New York City—even an island graveyard that's nearly impossible for the public to set foot on—there is the image of  debris from demolished buildings tagged with black spray paint. Where there's a will, there's a way.

There are many things revealed in Mr. Kilgannon's fine, informative piece that I didn't already know. Fifteen crumbling buildings from the island's onetime use as a prison, a sanitarium, and a psychiatric hospital have been demolished, opening up enough space to continue the burials for many more decades. Currently, there are 1,100 burials a year, in unmarked plain pine coffins that are stacked three deep.

Up until 2021 inmate crews from Rikers Island were chosen to facilitate in these burials, with the morgue trucks being ferried over from City Island.

The transition plan is to have the island come under the domain of the parks department, while burials will still take place, just not with prison labor. Limited pubic access will be established, with cell phone navigational tools to better find graves. There are no grave markers.

Not mentioned in the piece is if Hart Island is still used as the nursery for the Parks Department, with a significant portion of its land set aside for growing trees and flowers for the city's parks. Before the buildings were demolished, I used to read that the space needed for the burials was slowly taking up space set aside for horticulture.

That part of the island's use got my interest when sometime in the '60s when I was a teenager at the family flower shop, we got a handwritten letter from an inmate who was inquiring about the possibility of post-incarceration employment, since they were working in the greenhouse at the prison and were soon to be released.

I don't remember where the inmate was writing from. I do remember that the person said not to write back if there was no chance of employment, which there wasn't. We had all we could do to make the business provide a living for us, let along hire someone in addition. I'm sure the inmate wrote to lots of businesses. 

And since at the time inmates were being used to work the landscaping end of Hart Island, as well as doing burials, I always wondered it any of the inmates in those details tried to get post-incarceration employment in the funeral or landscaping business.

After all, they were gaining experience.

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