About a mile off the coast of the Bronx in New York City,
is a narrow piece of land, just one mile long.
It's called Hart Island
and it's home to the largest public cemetery in the United States,
where over 1 million people are buried.
Despite the island’s close proximity to New York,
it’s never been easy to access.
And over the decades, it’s developed a reputation.
To certain children, they were told it was a place you would never want to go
because it meant that you were unloved.
That was where they put people who had nobody
To find out that your loved one got put in what was nicknamed the potter's field
for New York is a truly bitter pill to swallow.
In April 2020, when first wave of coronavirus swept through New York City,
the island made national news for some grim scenes
“The mass grave being dug for coronavirus victims being dug at New York City’s potter’s field”
“They are burying unclaimed bodies on Hart Island”
“And the bodies are expected to continue to stack up”
Since then thousands more have been buried on Hart Island,
while the city has been working to revitalize its image.
So how did this island become a massive burial ground
and can its reputation change?
Burials on Hart Island date back to the Civil War,
when it was a training ground
and prisoner of war camp for the Union Army.
Soldiers who died were some of the first recorded people to be buried here.
Shortly after the war, in 1869, the city formally established the northern tip of the island as a cemetery,
where they would bury bodies of New Yorkers
who had no family members to organize burials for them.
The first civilian burial was Louisa Van Slyke,
who didn’t have any relatives listed on her death certificate.
She was an immigrant and she was a housekeeper and she was twenty-four years old.
Melinda Hunt created the Hart Island Project,
an organization that researches and provides information about burials on the island.
She died in the charity hospital, probably of infectious disease,
which was much more common in the 19th century.
Mass burials officially started here in 1875,
with over 1,800 burials in a single year.
And the city expanded on who could be buried there
to include fetuses, infants, those who couldn’t afford a private burial,
and even people who chose to be buried on Hart Island.
The island’s operations were run by the Department of Public Charities and Correction,
and when the agencies split in 1895, the Department of Correction assumed full control.
During the 1918 flu pandemic, burials regularly hit over 5,000 per year.
And mass-burials, where caskets are stacked in trenches, were common.
The cemetery didn’t take up the entire island though.
The city also built a hospital for the chronically ill, a reformatory school and a prison.
And during the Cold War, a missile storage site.
Because of this history, Hart Island is often mischaracterized
as an island full of New York’s unwanted and unloved.
But mostly, it serves as an essential part of the city’s infrastructure.
New York City is a very diverse big city
and every community has somebody buried there.
The Hart Island burial process hasn't changed much since the 1800s.
After a death, the Office of the Medical Examiner makes an attempt to contact family members.
If they can’t reach anyone…
Morgues prepare the body and put it on a ferry, with others, to Hart Island.
Then, workers unload individual pine caskets from the ferry,
dig a trench,
and either place it next to or on top of others.
Finally, it's covered in dirt and grass, - and its location is added to Hart Island burial records.
When I look at those images, I see a very orderly burial process.
There aren't monuments that indicate that somebody was more important than anybody else.
Everybody's buried in exactly the same way.
According to experts, the city did a decent job of maintaining burial records,
until a fire struck the island in the 1970s.
It destroyed some records,
and New York’s municipalities struggled to create a new organized system quickly.
And this happened as another health crisis was on the horizon.
“AIDS - Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome”
“We’re talking about a potential massive epidemic”
"AIDS could become one of the top ten causes of death in the United States"
New York City was hit especially hard by the AIDS epidemic.
Thousands were buried on Hart Island as a result.
And the cemetery, previously confined to the northern tip, expanded farther south.
Since the record system was broken, it was nearly impossible for people to determine where or if
their loved ones were buried on the island, until a public database was created in 2013.
But Hart Island has issues that go beyond record-keeping.
For most of its history, the island has been run by the Department of Correction,
the agency usually in charge of the city’s jails.
Many other cemeteries in New York City are run by the Department of Parks and Recreation,
an agency with expertise in landscaping and tourism.
For years, the city relied on the DOC's inmate labor for burials,
instead of hiring much needed landscapers to fix areas of disrepair on the island
Currently, the buildings on Hart Island are unstable. They're contaminated with asbestos.
These are very, very sacred places to people.
And the buildings are getting in the way of people remembering the lives of their relatives, their friends.
Plus grave markers don’t provide much information about who’s in the island’s mass graves.
Another major problem is erosion along the coasts of the island.
A CBS report from 2018 and the Hart Island Project
found exposed decades-old skeletons along the coasts.
The DOC also facilitated visitation to gravesites — but hasn't made it easy to visit.
The island is only accessible by ferry,
and the DOC only allowed a few visitor appointments per month.
All of this is why, today, Hart Island’s dark reputation persists.
I sort of feel that the city, in not talking about it, has made it seem a lot darker than it is.
Hart Island’s existing issues compounded during the coronavirus pandemic,
when the city sent a flood of unclaimed bodies.
In 1988, at the height of the AIDs crisis, there were over 1,500 burials on Hart Island.
In 2020, there were over 2,000.
One of these people was Roderick Paulus — a postal worker and toy collector in New York City,
who died from presumed COVID-19 on April 18, 2020.
Well, I spoke to Roderick in early April.
Anita Perry was Roderick’s best friend for over 30 years.
It was unusual because Roderick never coughs on the phone, you never really hear him fatigued.
He's always upbeat, happy, charismatic.
But this day he sounded a little tired.
He was coughing and he kept clearing his throat. And I kept asking him, is he OK?
He said, "I'm fine, sis. Don't worry about it." I said, "No, something sounds a little odd to me."
Since the pandemic started, the medical examiner’s office has
been making thousands of calls a week trying to find next-of-kin.
That’s how Anitta found out what happened to Roderick.
After four days of unsuccessfully trying to reach her friend on the phone, Anitta received
a call from a detective at the City's Medical Office informing her that Roderick had died.
He didn't have any living family in the U.S., so he always referred to Anitta as his next of kin
Roderick became more than a friend. Roderick became a brother to my family.
He was like my mother's son she never had.
He became godfather to my children.
Detectives didn't give Anitta the option to claim his body
because she wasn't directly related to Roderick.
Instead, Roderick was buried on Hart Island. Around here, in plot number 411.
We have no access to Hart Island, so for me, is it it was heartbreaking.
It was my biggest fear come true.
A closer look at the data reveals a pattern of who was sent to hart island during this pandemic.
These neighborhoods sent the most people to Hart Island in 2020.
Some of them had the highest death-rates in the city.
And they’re low-income neighborhoods with an overwhelming majority of black
and latino residents and frontline workers who often don't have access to healthcare.
These are the people most likely to be buried on Hart Island.
Roughly 1 in 10 of New York’s Covid victims will be interred here.
They're not statistics, they're not numbers, these are people that we loved.
"...Signing of a package of bills that really
rethinks and reconceptualizes the way that Hart Island operates. This has been a real deep
moral concern. We’re at a point now where we’re going to do things very differently."
A few months before New York City became the US coronavirus epicenter,
Mayor de Blasio began to move Hart Island’s jurisdiction from
the Department of Correction to the Department of Parks and Recreation.
And tasked them with making the island easier to visit, by increasing ferry service.
The city is also working with landscaping companies and federal agencies
to address erosion and keep cemetery grounds clean and organized.
Politicians have proposed adding a COVID memorial on Hart Island
in the hopes that the island can become a more welcoming place for grieving loved ones.
So there's no reason that people should fear a city burial.
In fact, we should celebrate it. And the more people feel that it's a good choice,
the more that's going to help the people who didn't really choose a city burial
to feel better about what happened to their relative.
Everybody needs a place to go to say goodbye.
But right now, I know for a fact my place is Hart Island. I want access to it.
I want a memorial put there for my best friend.
Because I'm telling you to heal New York, that's where it starts.