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.
Op een eilandje boven de Newyorkse wijk Queens ligt Hart Island, het grootste publieke massagraf ter wereld. Telegraaf TV nam een bijzonder kijkje op de plek waar alle ongeïdentificeerde overleden inwoners van de stad terechtkomen.
Every month, the bodies of about 125 people are shipped from New York City's medical examiner’s office to Hart Island just off the Bronx. It’s the final resting place for nearly one million people. For over a century, it’s where the city has buried its unclaimed dead and in some cases, babies that have died at childbirth or soon after.
Few visitors to New York are aware that a wooded island off the coast of the Bronx is home to one of the world’s largest burial grounds. Since 1869 over 850,000 corpses have been buried on Hart Island, yet the site – which is run by the Department of Correction and dug by prison inmates – is shrouded in so much secrecy that even relatives of the dead are denied the right to visit the graves.
Just north of the Bronx, on City Island, there is a road that dead ends at a dock on the Long Island Sound.
The trench is broad and deep. Pale brown earth has been freshly turned, ready for another row of coffins.
Hart Island has had many uses since the city of New York purchased it in 1868, but its primary function has been as a burial ground for the poor, the unidentified and the unclaimed. On this strip of land off the Bronx shore, ruined buildings that were once a borstal, a quarantine for tuberculosis patients and a lunatic asylum are surrounded by white posts, each marking the final resting place of either 150 adults or 1000 infants.
“The Graves of Forgotten New Yorkers,” by Bess Lovejoy and Allison C. Meier (Op-Ed, March 19), mentions an individual grave on Hart Island for the first child to die of AIDS in New York. In 1992, Joel Sternfeld and I photographed the marker for that plot.
On New York City maps, Hart Island drifts off the edge of the Bronx like an amputated leg. Among overgrown vegetation and ramshackle buildings spread out over 101 acres, about a million bodies are buried — the homeless, the poor, the stillborn, the unidentified and the unclaimed.
It's been 36 years since a hospital mistakenly allowed Elaine Joseph's newborn to be buried at the city's public cemetery on Hart Island. She's been to the island there times since then, searching for her baby.
“The feeling that it’s within your control to commemorate your loved one is an important feeling to restore,” says Melinda Hunt, an artist who, for the past two decades, has sought to do just that for relatives of the 850,000 people buried since the Civil War on Hart Island, a potter’s field in Long Island Sound.
At age 23, Elaine Joseph of Fresh Meadows lost her first child to a heart defect.
"At five days old, after suffering cardiac arrest before and after the surgery my daughter died," Joseph recalled.