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For years, it has been hard for New Yorkers to visit their loved ones buried on Hart Island because it was controlled by the city’s department of corrections. Now, the City Council has voted to transfer it to the parks department, making it more like a cemetery than a prison.

The New York City Council has voted to make Hart Island — the nation’s largest public burial ground — more accessible to families of the dead.

By a vote of 45-2, the council opted on Thursday to transfer control of the potter’s field from the Department of Correction to the parks department.

About 1 million people are buried on the desolate island, many anonymously and unclaimed. Graves are dug by prisoners of nearby Rikers Island jail, and the island off the Bronx is reachable only by an occasional ferry.

In recent years, erosion has washed remains into Long Island Sound.

Families who have located their loved ones have difficulties visiting graves under security imposed by prison authorities.

The city is considering public transportation stops that would expand access.

“The way to normalize this is to have people who do have a choice choosing this green burial,” Hunt said. Our taxes pay for City Cemetery, and we can reframe the way we think about public burials, she said. “You’ve already paid for your burial—make it the cemetery you want it to be.”

Next month, New York City will begin cleaning up unearthed human remains and restoring the damaged sea wall along the shoreline of Hart Island, which is one of the largest public cemeteries in the country.

Hart Island is a small islet located a mile east of the Bronx. It’s one mile long and a third of a mile wide (roughly 131 acres), and during the mid ’80s and ’90s, New York City buried thousands of people who’d died of HIV on the island out of fear the bodies might infect others.

“No one who sleeps there had a dollar to their name in life…the bodies interred here are as utterly forgotten and wiped away as if they never existed.” This is how the New York Herald described Hart Island in 1874, five years after the city began burying its poor on the island off the Bronx. A century and a half later the poor and unclaimed are still buried in pine coffins, usually marked only with numbers, not names. These are stacked three deep in a trench, three feet below the surface. Each trench holds 150 adult coffins. Roughly 1,200 people are buried there each year.

On May 30, the City Council held a hearing to review the future of Hart Island of the city’s public burial process.

“We’re the only city in the world that has a public cemetery like this one,” said Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who chaired the hearing. “After 150 years, it is time to reexamine and improve our island.”

The City Council clashed with the de Blasio administration Thursday over the future of Hart Island — a potter's field off the Bronx coast that serves as a mass grave for a million people — and whether it will be transformed into an accessible public cemetery. Speaker Corey Johnson bristled at the current policies that govern the island and called the de Blasio administration's lack of celerity "insane."

… "This is crazy that a million people are buried on Hart Island and there is one Saturday a month that people can visit," Johnson said at a joint Council hearing of the health, transportation, and parks and recreation committees. "This needs to be changed immediately. This is such a profound injustice. People should leave here today and be embarrassed by this. This is so undignified."

More than one million New Yorkers - most of their names unknown - are buried in mass, unmarked graves on Hart Island, a huge public cemetery a short distance from City Island in the Bronx.

Elsie Soto's father was laid to rest there after dying of AIDS-related complications. 

New York City has some of the most famous parks in the world, from Central Park to the High Line.

Now city lawmakers have proposed creating a park in a most unlikely place: the island where the city has been burying its indigent in mass graves since the 1800s.

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and activists slammed the de Blasio administration at a hearing Thursday over what they characterized as a slow motion plan to open up the public gravesite at Hart Island to more visitors and better maintain it.

Hart Island, a giant cemetery that many advocates consider neglected for years, is finally getting noticed by City Hall.

Elected officials have agreed to support a bill to transfer control of the island from the Department of Correction to the Department of Parks, CBS2’s Natalie Duddridge reported Thursday.

Curated by the award-winning critic, and former Hyperallergic Senior Editor, Jillian Steinhauer and dotted with homespun memorials and retiring audiovisuals, In the Presence of Absence is a smart, understated group exhibition whose hushed atmosphere calls attention to grief’s lingering effects in public and private life, particularly for people from historically marginalized communities. Most artworks in the show reference historical traumas in the United States — from settler colonialism to the AIDS epidemic — whose horrors are often presumed to be past but whose psycho-social consequences are still very much present.

The Hart Island Project is pleased to announce that Director Melinda Hunt is one of 63 recipients for inaugural round of NYC Women’s Fund for Film & Theater for her web series: Loneliness in a Beautiful Place: AIDS Burials on Hart Island. The award was announced by NYFA and MOME on February 28, 2019. read more

Inspired by stories of people who lost a loved one due to AIDS related illnesses and discovered them listed in the Traveling Cloud Museum, the web series will be completed in 2020. As part of The Hart Island Project AIDS Initiative, we hope the series will help to reconcile the deaths of New Yorkers buried on Hart Island during the AIDS epidemic. We encourage the community to search and identify victims with an AIDS ribbon and or contribute a story to Traveling Cloud Museum. 

Justice intersects with the dead on Hart Island, the potters’ field of New York City where over a million unclaimed bodies lie. Perhaps their inhabitants lost contact with anyone who knew them, due to rejection or mental illness or outliving their loved ones. Some families may be too poor to bury their dead, or end-of-life plans could have been lost as a dying person was shuttled between nursing homes and hospitals.

Hart Island gives rise to several concerns of fairness and justice.

Paperback mysteries usually end this way, not Disney fairy tales. In March of 1968, a pair of children playing in an abandoned, Greenwich Village tenement in New York City discovered a young man dead on a cot, surrounded by beer bottles and religious handouts. There were no obvious signs of foul play. He had no identification. The body was unknown and went unclaimed. 

Today, as space for interment within the five boroughs becomes ever more limited and expensive, and as concerns about environmental and spatial sustainability come to the fore, designers and cemetery stewards are beginning to envision new urban systems of death. When every inch is contested, how can space for contemplation and remembrance be preserved, even if space for “traditional” burial is not?

Fergus Griffin is no longer missing. His Hart Island clock stopped ticking after 28 years, 241 days, 38 minutes and 15 seconds, when family members posted loving tributes to him on hartisland.net, following his positive identification via DNA testing.

New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson plans to mount an aggressive effort to turn Hart Island — the potter’s field where prisoners bury New York’s poor in mass graves — into a more publicly accessible cemetery.

And he says he'll do so even if it means overriding the will (and veto) of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“Once you visit Hart Island, it's very apparent and clear that the current state of affairs on Hart Island is..." Johnson paused to find the right word: "indefensible.”

Hart Island is out of sight and out of mind for many New Yorkers, but the small plot of land has a significant spot in the city’s history.

During the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, thousands of bodies were buried on the island in what has commonly become known as Potter’s Field.

It’s not clear the exact number of AIDS victims that are buried there and unfortunately, state officials have been reluctant to investigate.

Though, just days before World AIDS Day, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson visited the island to pay respects.Arriving on Tuesday, he called his visit “emotional” and noted that the mass graves seemed forgotten there.