New Yorkers demand access to mass graves on convict island
By Will Pavia, Times of London
Campaigners, residents and a group of women who each lost a child at birth will gather this weekend for a meeting on City Island on the edge of the Bronx, hoping to shed light on one of New York City’s darkest and strangest secrets.
Searching for My Dead Baby in a New York Mass Grave
By Matthew Bannister, BBC World Service Outlook
New Yorker Elaine Joseph tells Matthew Bannister about her 35-year search for the body of her baby daughter Tomika, who died when she was just a few days old. Elaine believes Tomika's body may be in a public cemetery.
The Bronx's 'Isle of the Dead' may get new life as park
By Jennifer Cunningham, New York Daily News
A Bronx-based potter’s Field that’s been in use since the Victorian era may get a new life.
Part of Hart Island, a 130-acre isle off mainland Bronx that has been used as a public cemetery since 1869, may become the city’s newest park after a Queens lawmaker vowed to revisit a measure that would bring it under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department.
On Tuesday morning, the first snow flurries of the season fell on New York’s potter’s field, drifting down into an open trench, dusting the dirt next to hundreds of corpses in bare wooden caskets.
Kelly ventures to mysterious islands around New York to unearth the secrets that lie hidden in their past. On Hart Island, she meets with experts who enrich our understanding of the site’s rich history: before it became the city’s cemetery for unclaimed bodies, Hart Island was the training ground for African American regiments during the Civil War, as well as a mental asylum and hospital site