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“Hart Island has been treated as a topic of shame in this city, and it's largely been kept out of the public consciousness of New Yorkers,” Council Member and health committee chair Mark Levine, who sponsored pieces of the legislation, said during an oversight hearing on Hart Island Wednesday. “It should be a dignified place open to the public, not just to people who have loved ones buried there. A place which uplifts and celebrates the history, offers reverence to the stories of those who are buried there, including victims of the most recent pandemic.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s executive budget also includes more than $50 million in capital funding to demolish dangerous structures on the property. “The buildings are scary to people who visit,” said Melinda Hunt, founder of the Hart Island Project. “They're a reminder of Hart Island being managed by the penal system for a very long time.”

Hart Island, a small piece of land off The Bronx, resurfaced in national headlines in April 2020, when New York City became the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.

News footage of the island’s cemetery showed trenches being filled with pine coffins, sending shock waves around the world. But these mass burials taking place during the pandemic mark just the most recent interments in Hart Island’s long history.

Last year on Hart Island proved deadlier than any year during the AIDS crisis. More burials are expected as the disproportionate pandemic impact sends thousands to the final resting place of New York’s most vulnerable.

The federal government will help pay for the funeral and burial of COVID-19 victims whose families can’t afford the expenses, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced Monday. 

In a rare joining of forces, the two New York members of Congress, who disagree on the Democratic Party platform, said that the Federal Emergency Management Administration will tap into the overall $2 billion national pot of disaster funds to cover the costs.

New York State will get approximately $260 million in funeral assistance funds, according to Schumer. FEMA will cover all funeral expenses, which run an average of $7,000. People can file retroactively for reimbursements dating back to Jan. 20, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2020

In more normal times, Scott Green , a lifelong civil rights activist, may have had a ceremonious funeral followed by a burial in a military cemetery in Little Rock, Ark.

Mr. Green was one of the students known as the Lost Class of 1959 at Central High School, where a battle over forced desegregation in Little Rock helped propel the civil rights movement. After he died in April at age 76 with symptoms of Covid-19 in Manhattan, former President Bill Clinton called Mr. Green’s family to extend his condolences….

In 1965, Scott Green became first Black trainee of the local Sheet Metal Workers’ Union, and he would later recruit more Black members and go on to fight racial discrimination, while working on prominent buildings including the World Trade Center, his brother said.

In a somber sundown ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial in a city virtually occupied by troops on guard against political violence, Mr. Biden paid tribute to the victims of the pandemic on the same day that the death toll in the United States topped a staggering 400,000— and almost a year to the day from the first report of the virus appearing in the country.

“To heal we must remember,” Mr. Biden said, standing in front of the Reflecting Pool, which was surrounded by 400 lights meant to mark the 400,000 victims of the virus. “It’s hard sometimes to remember. But that’s how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation. That’s why we’re here today. Between sundown and dusk, let us shine the lights in the darkness along the sacred pool of reflection and remember all whom we lost.” 

If all goes according to plan, Hart Island, the city’s public cemetery, will become the site of a memorial for New Yorkers who died of COVID-19 as well as thousands of others lost to the Spanish flu, AIDS and other mass casualty events.

Details are still being ironed out, but city officials say that work on the memorial will begin in earnest once Hart Island is placed under the authority of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department on July 1, 2021.

No one knows who will be carried across the water to Hart Island on the next waves of the dead. No one knows who will be brought back from its anonymous earth by shovel-bearing workers in hazmat suits. This summer, reporter William Hennigan was granted unprecedented access to Hart Island to observe burial and exhumation operations and, on June 26, witnessed the retrieval and formal reburial of casket 40-3 and its occupant, Ellen F. Torron. This is her story.

As #Covid19 victims are laid to rest in NYC's public cemetery — the largest mass grave in the U.S. — the Hart Island Project aims to support their families and increase awareness of the island's history

New York’s potter’s field became an unlikely savior during the coronavirus crisis — more than quintupling its usual pace of burials during the height of the pandemic, new stats show.

With funeral homes and morgues overflowing with corpses as the disease ravaged the city, Hart Island took 894 bodies between March 9 and Friday.

Coronavirus has created a grim new reality at the nation’s largest mass grave. 

Only 11 miles from Manhattan, Hart Island has been the final resting place for New York’s unclaimed and poor for over a century. The island off the Bronx was thrust into the national spotlight in early April, after the city announced it would be using the public cemetery to inter unclaimed victims of covid-19.

Occupying 131 acres in Long Island Sound, off the Bronx shore, Hart Island is the largest public burial ground in the United States. It has been New York City’s public burial ground for more than 150 years. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, it is being pressed into service as a temporary resting place for deceased New Yorkers whose families could not retain a funeral home.

Some have called it a home for mass graves, but for more than a hundred years, Hart Island has been the city’s public cemetery.

Melinda Hunt, president of the Hart Island Project, a nonprofit which works to increase access to the island said the site is a well-managed public burial ground which has operated for generations.

 New York City officials have hired contract laborers to bury the dead in its potter’s field on Hart Island as the city’s daily death rate from the coronavirus epidemic has reached grim new records in each of the last three days.

At least once a week between January and March, J. Crawford woke up around 5:30 A.M. on Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail complex, and changed into work boots and an orange and white jumpsuit. Around six o’clock, he boarded a bus operated by the Department of Correction, which carried incarcerated workers and a few correction officers to a ferry on City Island, in the Bronx.

They died poor and unclaimed and before their lives began. They died but before they died, they left their flesh, their eyes to science. They died lost to themselves or lost to others, loved or barely liked, in secret or on the street or without telling anyone that they were dying.

On an island off New York City, authorities in 2018 found 174 bones unearthed on a site that holds the remains of more than 1 million people. The culprit was shoreline erosion.

Historically, the island — the world’s largest tax-funded cemetery — has operated under the purview of the Department of Corrections (DoC), which pays Rikers Island inmates $1 an hour to handle the area’s many bodies. The bill, which Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law earlier this month, will transfer control of Hart Island to the New York City Parks Department.

NYC mayor signed a bill that transfers control of the nations largest public burial ground, Hart Island, from the city corrections dept to the parks department

NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Mayor Bill de Blasio has signed a bill making Hart Island, the largest public burial ground in the nation, a city park.