Hart Island: Coronavirus burials in New York remake history - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
Only 11 miles from Manhattan, Hart Island has been the final resting place for New York’s unclaimed and poor for over a century.
-
It is the largest mass grave in the United States. At least 1,000 bodies are buried on the island a year, and more than 1 million can be found in the plots of its potter’s field, known as City Cemetery.
-
Its earliest iteration was as a training ground for soldiers during the Civil War. Purchased by the city in 1868, the land in the Long Island Sound has been home to a boys reformatory, asylum, prison, rehab center and even a Nike missile silo
- ...7 more annotations...
-
The first documented burial took place on April 22, 1869, according to Melinda Hunt, director of the Hart Island Project, a nonprofit organization identifying and tracking burials on the island.
-
This concept of honoring the dead was particularly relevant during the AIDS epidemic of the late ’80s and ’90s, which killed more than 100,000 people in New York. Many AIDS patients were laid to rest at Hart Island in an isolated area from other remains and in deeper individual graves because of the stigma and lack of knowledge about how AIDS spread.
-
Hunt says New York City as a whole has never run out of burial space. “The city is able to recycle graves after 25 years
-
Mass burials on Hart Island often hold a negative association, most likely because of the way burials have evolved throughout history, as private funerals have become the norm.
-
Those epidemics include the yellow fever and tuberculosis outbreaks of the 19th century, when the island was used as a quarantine station for those who were infected. It also proved key in handling the waves of victims associated with the spread of the great flu pandemic of 1918, when over 30,000 deaths were recorded in the city — 20,000 of which came that fall alone.
-
The burials were long conducted by inmates, most often from Rikers Island. “You hear people who say if you go to Hart’s, you’re going to be haunted the rest of your life,” said Saxon Palmer, a former Rikers inmate, who was on the job for the entirety of his four-month sentence in 2019. “Then most people wouldn’t come back the next week.”
-
“I’ve often referred to Hart Island as New York City’s family tomb. … There’s something really meaningful about that, to be buried with earlier generations,” Hunt said. “We want for people to be able to stay connected … because that’s what is going to make us feel safe in the end, that the city has honored every life.”