News and Events

New York's Hart Island is the nation's largest pauper's cemetery, and it's notoriously inaccessible to family members of the deceased.

Roy Foss was a father who fought and lost a battle against alcoholism. Jan Winiarski sent money back to his family in Poland. Kenneth Selesky loved to cook. And Leonard Melfi was a famous playwright—who eerily wrote a play about dying anonymously.

Charisma Troiano (Brooklyn Daily Eagle) talks with Melinda Hunt (Hart Island Project) and Bess Lovejoy (Historian) about the potter's field for Brooklyn.

Original air date: Jan 6, 2015

The over one million people buried on New York City’s Hart Island are unified by their invisibility.

They're unearthing the untold tales of the once-nameless faces buried in the city’s most mysterious final resting place.

Activists behind the push for access to a mass grave on Hart Island have launched an interactive website allowing loved ones to discover and eulogize family buried there.

Sitting just off the east coast of the Bronx and a short boat ride from Manhattan is Hart Island, a tiny mile-long atoll and former Civil War prison camp that has for decades, and continues to be, a mysterious mass grave.

The Hart Island Project has launched its website that attempts to bring a name, face, and story to the 62,200
people buried in mass graves on the notoriously inaccessible Bronx island since 1980.

With Hart Island Guests: John Doyle, Melinda Hunt

Hart Island, home to the city’s Potter’s Field burial sites that’s now off limits except for relatively infrequent visiting days, could soon be abuzz with visitors.

Lush and unspoiled, within commuting distance of Manhattan, Hart Island would be a draw if admission rules weren’t so strict: You must be dead to stay and an inmate to visit.

Marie Garcia never met her baby sister - and isn’t allowed to visit her grave.

Garcia’s mother, Rosaria Cortes Lusero, gave birth to a stillborn baby girl in October, 1995 at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens after a doctor attempted to reposition the baby in her womb.

Supported by tax payers on a city-owned island, New York City’s potter’s field is one of the country’s most inaccessible publicly funded spaces. The Hart Island cemetery is the secluded final resting place for over a million people, their bodies layered in trenches by inmates from nearby Rikers Island.

A federal lawsuit Wednesday demanded public access to a small uninhabited island off New York City where the remains of about a million people who were poor or unknown are buried.

They're dead and buried — and off limits.

A new class action lawsuit claims the city is violating New Yorkers’ civil rights by not not allowing them to visit relatives’ gravesites on Hart Island in the Long Island Sound.

When Millie died last year, her foster mother was in a nursing home and her pimp was in jail. Nobody came to collect her body, so the city buried her where it has interred a million other unclaimed bodies: in a massive trench on an inaccessible, desolate shard of land in Long Island Sound called Hart Island.

City Island leaders toured Hart Island in a continuing effort to gain support for its transfer from the Department of Corrections to the Parks Department.

Traditionally, New York City officials have preferred not to draw attention to the unidentified bodies that pass through city morgues and receive public burials in mass graves on Hart Island, off the coast of the Bronx.

Hart Island is the final resting place for more than 1 million New Yorkers, all buried by inmates. The mysterious mass grave has been closed to the public for decades but is now opening its gates to relatives, like Roberta Omin.

Most New Yorkers don't even know of its existence, but one of the city's islands houses a mass grave of more than a million bodies.

Paying a Visit to Forgotten New Yorkers.