Hart Island holds a unique place in the life of one of the world's most vibrant cities. It is where the bodies of dead people go when they are unclaimed by others.
Hart Island is the lonely strip of land in Long Island Sound where the bodies of New York City's unclaimed dead lie in mass graves.
Under a New York State law rooted in the 1850s and last amended in 2007, next of kin can have as little as 48 hours after a death to claim a body for burial, or 24 hours after notification, “if the deceased person is known to have a relative whose place of residence is known or can be ascertained after reasonable and diligent inquiry.”
Rosalee Grable’s last wish was to be buried with other poor people in New York City’s potter’s field on Hart Island — an eroding 100-acre spit of land on Long Island Sound.
The baby boy lived only 90 minutes after he was born on Oct. 23, 2003. Without money to bury him, his mother, Katrina DeJesus, reluctantly signed papers letting New York City lay him to rest. She would not be allowed to visit the city cemetery where the baby was buried, officials told her, because it was off limits, under the jurisdiction of the Correction Department.
In New York City, there's a little-known island where as many as a million people are buried. It's a public cemetery for homeless people, stillborn babies and unclaimed remains. Visiting Hart Island is a challenge — even for families of the deceased, and now, some of those families are trying to change that.
Hart Island is New York City’s Potter’s field – the place where the city buries its unidentified, its unclaimed and its poor. Since 1875, more than a million people have been put in unmarked graves there. The island is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Correction, which means it’s out of bounds for everybody else.
Each year, hundreds of New Yorkers are buried in trenches dug deep in the soil of Hart Island, a sliver of forgotten land in the Long Island Sound off the eastern shore of the Bronx.
The wind and light rain sweeping the docks in City Island, a small island of fishermen in the Long Island sound, east of the Bronx.
Rosalee Grable looks out over rows of white pipes, some broken or covered in mud, sticking out of a dirt field. Each tube marks the grave of 150 adults...
It was a vision to beguile many New Yorkers: an all-but-forgotten island in Long Island Sound that a noisy city would transform into its most tranquil park.
Speaking before the City Council on Wednesday, New York Civil Liberties Union attorney Christopher Dunn described what it's like to visit Hart Island, where more than 1 million New Yorkers are buried...
City leaders are debating whether control of Hart Island should be transferred to one of two city agencies.
Hart Island lies to the east of New York City and is the largest tax-funded mass cemetery in the world.
The city made a serious mistake for a veteran deserving of a proper burial.
On July 19, Rosaria Cortes Lusero was able for the first time to visit her stillborn daughter’s burial site. She had died just a few days after being born in 1995 and—as is the case with all stillborn infants where no private arrangements are made—buried in a mass grave site on Hart Island in the Bronx which the public could not access.
In October 2001, the sixty-nine year old playwright and actor Leonard Melfi was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where he expired four hours later of congestive heart failure.
August 26, 2015 - Dr. Joseph Schuldenrein interviews Melinda Hunt about the history of City Cemetery in New York and The Hart Island Project’s proposal to the transform Hart Island into America’s first urban natural burial ground.
