Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (50 page)

Melinda believes there’s a ring of truth to this, since
hart
is the archaic English word for “stag” and deer have been spotted there.

Any valiant notions on my part to go ashore, legal consequences be damned, dissipate the moment billboard-sized warnings on Hart Island loom into view:
RESTRICTED AREA/NO TRESPASSING/NO DOCKING/NO ANCHORING/VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
. I tell Melinda I’ll definitely stick to our original plan of just circling the island, and she nods in agreement.

If the signs weren’t menacing enough, more than a dozen boats are marooned, some upside down and rotting, along Hart Island’s thin, rocky shoreline. I’m guessing they’ve been left here simply because the DOC lacks the funds and manpower to remove them and not to intimidate potential trespassers. Nevertheless, they certainly amplify the DOC’s message to stay away.

The land itself still looks like the peaceful, bucolic setting William Styron described six decades ago. I’m surprised, though, that the trees aren’t bigger, having been left alone for so many years.

I mention this to Melinda, who replies: “Mass graves don’t yield tall trees.”

We hug the coast, and I notice dozens upon dozens of what appear to be round white markers pressed into a large grassy knoll at least several acres in size.

“That’s where the infants are,” Melinda says. “Each marker represents one thousand babies.”

God, there must be tens of thousands of children buried here. And this is a relatively small parcel of land.

The DOC estimates that there are approximately 850,000 bodies interred on Hart Island, each one of them unclaimed or unwanted. The island’s ledger is a catalog of forgotten lives and tragic deaths. Suicide victims pulled from the Hudson River. Homebound elderly found dead of starvation or heatstroke in their apartments. Stillborn infants whose parents couldn’t afford to bury them. Teenage runaways beaten to death. Homeless addicts who overdosed in condemned buildings. New York is where they all happened to die, but they came from across this country and around the world. Although owned and managed by the city, Hart Island is a cemetery of national significance. It is the largest potter’s field in the United States.

“I think the number might actually be closer to one million, if not more,” Melinda says, “and almost half of them are children under five years of age. It’s incredibly sad.” An estimated twelve hundred interments take place each year. Adults are buried in pine boxes stacked three high, twenty-five across, two rows per trench. For babies, the coffins are five high and roughly twenty across in a single row.

Jacob Riis was also particularly moved by the number of children who ended up here. “The stormier the night, the more certain is the police nursery to echo with the feeble cries of abandoned babes,” he wrote in
How the Other Half Lives
.

Saint Matthew’s Gospel contains the first written reference to a “potter’s field.” After Judas, in a fit of shame, threw the thirty silver coins he’d earned for betraying Jesus onto the Temple floor, the head priests looked at the money and debated what to do with it. “And the chief priests took the silver pieces,” Matthew writes in chapter 27, verses 6 through 7, “and said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.’ And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.” The name stuck.

Every large metropolis grapples with how to handle its unclaimed dead. For smaller towns it’s less of an issue because the deceased are usually known by someone. Melinda tells me that New York is the only major U.S. city to maintain a separate potter’s field, and until 1869 there were several of them spread around Manhattan. Madison Square Garden, the New York Public Library, Washington Square Park, and the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria hotel were all built over “paupers’ burial grounds,” as they were also called. Today, most cities have contracts with local mortuaries and cemeteries to cremate unclaimed corpses after a designated period of time. In Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., it’s a mere thirty days. At Hart Island, bodies are buried for twenty-five years, and then the bones are dug up and bunched together to make room for the newcomers.

Hart Island, Melinda has also taught me, is more than a potter’s field. It’s a time capsule of America’s past. Siwanoy Indians sold the territory to a wealthy physician named Thomas Pell in 1654, and in the 1700s it was purchased by the DeLancey family, a French-born clan of aristocratic Huguenots. (They also owned an elaborate mansion at 54 Pearl Street in lower Manhattan that was later converted into Fraunces Tavern. New York’s Sons of Liberty met and conspired there in the years before the Revolution, and, after the war, George Washington famously bid his troops farewell from the building’s Long Room.)

The federal government used Hart Island as a military training ground in 1861 and then as a prisoner-of-war camp for Confederate troops. Disease, coupled with the North’s icy winters, cut down the captured rebels faster than Union bullets. Mortality rates for POWs on Hart Island were among the worst in the nation.

When New York acquired the island in 1868, it allocated forty-five acres for burials on a low-lying section of land on the north side, and saved the southern portion for other city institutions and programs. Hart Island has been home to an infirmary for quarantined victims of the 1870 yellow-fever epidemic, an insane asylum, a women’s hospital, a tubercularium, disciplinary barracks for unruly sailors and Marines during World War II, an alcohol- and drug-treatment center, and prison annexes.

“This was a perfect testing ground for pilot social programs because it’s isolated and in a natural setting,” Melinda says.

In the late nineteenth century young inmates were sent here to be rehabilitated, not just punished. This was all part of a growing penal-reform movement in America promoted by Edward Livingston, a New York lawyer and U.S. congressman who recommended that prisoners earn rewards for good behavior and, instead of remaining shackled behind bars all day and night, be allowed to go outside—on the condition that they performed meaningful labor. The first inmates on Hart Island were put to work, from the very start, digging graves.

As we round the northeast corner of the island, we pass another cluster of trees. “Through there is the missile silo,” Melinda says.

This I had also heard about. Along with everything else, Hart Island functioned as a miniature Nike launch base during the Cold War. Installed in 1955, the missiles represented the last line of defense against a potential Soviet strike on New York City. They were removed in 1961.

“Has there ever been any commercial development on the island?” I ask Melinda. Spruced up, it would make for an ideal weekend retreat.

“No,” Melinda says, “but it’s been tried.” In 1925 an African American businessman named Solomon Riley, she tells me, attempted to build an amusement park billed as “the Negro Coney Island” on Hart
Island’s southern tip. Riley had already spent a sizeable chunk of change on the plan before city administrators shut him down, claiming that such a resort would be inappropriate so near the prison dormitories. “The main reason they stopped it,” Melinda says, “is because the surrounding white communities didn’t want an influx of black tourists.”

We’ve come full circle. Had we not stopped or slowed down, we probably could have rounded the whole place in about three minutes. I cut the engine and we bob in the choppy water.

So far, nothing I’ve seen indicates that Hart Island is a burial ground swollen with remains or, as it’s been referred to, the densest graveyard in America. Even if I had gone ashore, I wouldn’t have spotted much evidence that I was walking across a cemetery. Grass and vegetation grow quickly over the trenches, masking them within a season, and on the entire island there’s only one individual grave. Situated deep in a wooded area, its headstone reads
SC-B1
, 1985. That’s it. Underneath lies New York’s first infant victim of AIDS. Its placement is unintentionally symbolic of the disease’s early years, when sufferers were feared and ostracized. I can’t imagine a more friendless grave than this one, hidden away on an island that is itself all but unknown and out of sight.

Three monuments stand on Hart Island. One is for indigent Civil War veterans, and another was constructed by inmates after World War II, and it’s an austere, thirty-foot-tall rectangular block of concrete inscribed with the word
PEACE
and nothing else.

And near the center of the cemetery is a ten-foot stone cross, also very minimalist, with an excerpt from the Gospel according to John engraved on its squat base:
HE CALLETH HIS OWN BY NAME
. Priests from Saint Benedict’s Parish in the Bronx have occasionally been allowed to bless this site on Ascension Thursday and pray for those buried here. Otherwise, no other funeral rites or official ceremonies are regularly performed on the island.

Which doesn’t mean there aren’t ongoing efforts to remember the dead when they’re laid to rest. During Melinda’s visits to the island in the early 1990s, she interacted with prisoners who’d signed up for
the grave-digging detail and was moved by their heartfelt gestures to memorialize these total strangers. Although prohibited from bringing any personal items or gifts to the island, the men placed at the graves offerings of food, fresh flowers they’d found nearby, and small improvised crosses.

In March 1992, Melinda had encouraged inmates, with the DOC’s permission, to write about Hart Island and its impact on them. Far from responding with reluctance, the men were eager to open up, and Melinda shared with me several of the testimonials before we met.

“I’ve been on Hart Island, working now for almost two months,” an inmate named Charles Yarborough recalled, “and in my opinion the hardest thing I find about being here is putting down the little ones.… No one knows where they are, what happened to the kids. That makes me think about my kids, about what and how they’re doing.”

“One thing I’ve learned from Hart Island is that I don’t want to die [a] nobody with nothing or no one to care about me,” another inmate wrote anonymously. “Hart Island is the best rehabilitation I’ve ever had and is something I’ll never forget. I guess it’s the loneliest place in the world and I pray and will always pray for the lonely and lost souls of Hart Island.”

Nobody is on the island at the moment. Today’s a Sunday and burials take place only during the week. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NYPD Harbor Patrol or DOC officers conducted random sweeps every so often, but it’s empty now, and I haven’t spotted any police boats patroling the Sound either. Part of me is still tempted to sneak ashore, at the very least to say I’d set foot on Hart Island.

Ultimately, though, I’m content and ready to call it a day. I scan the island’s length one last time, still overwhelmed by the knowledge that within this rustic, unremarkable patch of land, upward of one million men, women, and children are entombed.

As we motor back to City Island, I ask Melinda when Hart Island is expected to fill up.

“It’s hard to say exactly,” she says. “The numbers, I learn, are actually
going down, from about three thousand a year in the 1980s to two thousand in the 1990s to twelve hundred now.”

I would have assumed the numbers would be growing, simply because the general population is constantly expanding, but Melinda tells me that technology has made it easier for families to locate dead relatives, and social programs have cut mortality rates among the homeless, individuals with mental illnesses, and addicts.

“The most dramatic reduction in the past two decades has been in the number of stillborns,” Melinda says. “You can track the decline starting in the mid-1990s, when New York began offering comprehensive prenatal care for poor women.”

No one has studied these numbers more than Melinda; she and her volunteers have typed into the Hart Island Project’s computerized database the names of sixty thousand people, along with information about when, where, and how they died. DOC administrators refused at first to give Melinda copies of Hart Island’s records, but she eventually acquired them through New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The documents, all handwritten, covered only 1977 to 2007; everything before 1977 had been stored in the warden’s house on Hart Island, and vandals set the building on fire earlier that year, probably unaware of what they were destroying. Several hundred thousand names went up in smoke, forever erased.

“Are you familiar with Clara Barton’s work to gather the names of Civil War soldiers who didn’t return home?” I ask Melinda before we say our farewells.

“I’m not,” she replies.

“It’s a lot like what you’re doing.”

Barton is best remembered for risking her life during the war to nurse and comfort wounded soldiers under fire (at Antietam a bullet sliced through her blouse and killed the young man she was treating). But “the Angel of the Battlefield,” as she was nicknamed, also earned her wings by helping family members of dead and imprisoned troops find out what had become of them.