News and Events

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Hart Island, a massive burial ground near the Bronx, is eroding, unearthing human skeletons along the shoreline.

City workers are making emergency repairs to the public cemetery on Hart Island after photographers documented how human remains had become exposed to the elements.

Faced with storm erosion on Hart Island that continues to unearth human remains, New York City officials this week are planning an urgent recovery of bones from its shores, saying they also want to accelerate repairs to the island’s sea wall damaged by superstorm Sandy.

How did it take 35 years for anyone to find out William Boken was dead?

It’s a question we’ve been asked often since news broke last week of the discovery of human remains believed to be Louise Pietrewicz buried beneath Mr. Boken’s former basement.

Kevin Germany walked out of a hospital in 1990 and disappeared. In 2018, his family learned where he had been, a sad answer to his mother’s wish.

With thousands of deceased buried beneath its surface, Hart Island is home to the largest publicly funded cemetery on the planet. Hidden away on the northeastern edge of New York City on the Long Island Sound, it’s off-limits to the general public. Since the 1800s, it’s acted as a potter’s field, or a mass grave that serves as the final resting place for many of the city’s most disenfranchised citizens. 

NEW YORK (CBS New York) — There have been more than a million people buried in the mass graves on Hart Island since 1869, but since the damage of Hurricane Sandy, that’s become a gruesome problem.

“My baby was buried right near the water,” Dr. Laurie Grant from the Hart Island Project told CBS2’s Natalie Duddridge. 

Despite damage from superstorm Sandy to cemetery land exposing human remains on Hart Island, repairs won’t begin for two years — a situation that shocks those concerned about the future of the nation’s largest public burial ground.

On February 23, 2018, members of YANA New England sponsored luncheon discussion tables at the SOM Philanthropy Conference.  Topics ranged from how nonprofits can navigate risk and pursue grant-alternative investments, to leveraging partnerships and social media.  Many thanks to Laurie Cameron Craighead SOM ’16 for organizing and bringing together  Melinda Hunt MFA ’85, Marci Sternheim Ph.D. ’89, Rob Leighton SOM ’88, Eileen McDonald Egan MPH ’83, Richard Russell ’81 and Todd Brecher ’91 to provide their expertise and positive energy!

The Hart Island Project’s founder Melinda Hunt is interviewed by Greg Oliver for this behind the scenes special about Hart Island with British actor Luke Evans. The AIienist is a dramatic series on TNT tonight.

Aagot Iversen Gulbrandsen ble født 16. oktober i 1893 i Bergen. Sammen med mannen Olaf, gjorde hun som så mange - emigrerte til Amerika i 1916, 23 år gammel.

Every day, a group of detainees leave Rikers' Island prison in New York. Not to go to court, but to volunteer for an unusual job: digging graves. This drone video shows a disinterment of a twenty-five year old mass gravesite.

The plain wooden coffins are lowered, one by one, from the back of a morgue truck into the hands of waiting inmates, men standing in a pre-dug trench already filled with other bodies on a small, narrow strip of land off the coast of the Bronx.

We have sponsored legislation in the City Council to transfer jurisdiction from the Department of Corrections to an agency far better suited to a mission of public access, historic preservation and management of the island’s natural environment: the city’s Parks Department.

Del 10 av 10. Det sista avskedet. På ön Hart Island utanför Manhattan begravs de okända och oönskade. Konstnären Melinda Hunt har i över tjugofem år tid arbetat med att länka ihop öns döda med eventuella anhöriga i livet. Vi möter konstnären och forskaren Jae Rhim Lee, som skapat "the mushroom death suit"; en dräkt med invävda svampsporer som äter upp kroppen och renar den från gifter. Vi träffar också Margareta Magnusson, som skrivit en bok om hur man döstädar, alltså slänger och rensar i livet för att underlätta för de efterlevande. Programledare: Lina Thomsgård.

Darryl Alladice and his brother, Paul, were born and raised in New York City. In 1987, Paul was striving to become an actor in New York. Darryl moved to Boston to pursue a music career. By 1997, the two had grown distant, talking every few months.

Part 2 of a series on Hart Island, New York City's potter's field where more than 1 one million people have been buried in mass graves since 1960.

Hart Island is New York City's potter's field. It is a tiny island off of the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound where more than one million people have been buried since the 1860s.

Karen Mary Connors lived alone and died that way in 2011. The only child of a New York City firefighter turned lawyer, she lived her final years cloistered in what had been her family’s summer home in the Rockaways, with only a few houses standing between her and the Atlantic Ocean.

Relatives of people buried at a New York City island that serves as the largest mass grave in the United States will have increased access to the cemetery under a modified lawsuit settlement announced on Tuesday.