In April 2020, a Reuters drone operator flew over the eastern edge of a small island in Long Island Sound, one mile off the coast of the Bronx, and pointed his camera down. The footage showed a freshly dug trench lined with rows of simple wooden coffins. Workers in protective suits and orange vests lowered them one after another with a small excavator. Within 24 hours, the images reached hundreds of millions of viewers.
Newspapers around the world published them under headlines with the same implication: New York City was burying its dead in mass graves. What that coverage did not explain was that the island in the footage had been doing exactly that without interruption for 151 years. The island is called Hart Island. Spanning 131 acres of weeds and eroded brickwork, it holds more human remains than any other cemetery in the United States.
More than one million people are buried there in trenches dug in rows, 150 coffins at a time, stacked three layers deep. Most have no headstones. Many have no names at all, just a number written on a wooden stake or, later, a small concrete marker. For 150 years, the graves were not dug by cemetery workers but by inmates transported from Rikers Island, paid 50 cents an hour to bury the city’s dead.
The list of those buried there includes unclaimed infants. Among them is the first documented child in New York City to die of AIDS, buried 14 feet deep, alone, at the far southern end of the island, out of fear of an infection that had no basis in medical fact. By spring 2020, the list also included thousands of New Yorkers who died from a virus no one fully understood yet. They were buried by contractors wearing protective suits after the inmates who had done this work for a century finally refused to do it.
The legal justification the city offered for keeping the same agency in charge of both its prisons and its cemetery for all that time was framed in terms of safety, not punishment. Officials pointed to the complete lack of public infrastructure on the island, no running water, no bathrooms beyond portable units, no paved roads, plus the physical dangers of open burial trenches always in the process of being dug somewhere. Whether this justification truly required subjecting every grieving family to prison-style entry procedures, including confiscation of phones, or whether it simply reflected a century and a half of institutional inertia, no one in city government bothered to seriously question it. It is a question advocates like Melinda Hunt spent decades asking aloud before anyone in a position of real authority agreed to answer it.
Access to the island was controlled by the same agency that runs New York City’s prisons for a century and a half. Families wanting to visit a relative’s grave had to apply through the Department of Corrections, undergo searches, and surrender their phones before boarding a prison ferry. That only changed in 2021, after decades of struggle by a small group of advocates. To understand Hart Island, you have to go back before the graves, before the paupers’ fields, before the city even decided what the island was for.
You have to go back to a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, and to a young woman named Louisa Van Slyke, whom no one in New York City had any reason to remember until she became the reason the island exists as it does today. Hart Island sits at the western end of Long Island Sound, close enough to the mainland that on a clear day you can see it from the shore of City Island, the small fishing community in the Bronx it is sometimes confused with. Before the city touched it, the land belonged to a family named Hunter, who bought it from the descendants of a previous owner named Thomas Pell, who, according to local tradition, purchased it directly from the Siwanoy people who lived along that coast in the seventeenth century. For most of its early history, it was unremarkable farmland, valued mainly for its isolation.
The name itself is a small mystery the island’s historians have not fully solved. Some accounts trace it to the island’s shape as seen from the water, said to resemble a hart, an Old English word for a male deer. Others suggest it is a corruption or derivation of an earlier name in the historical record. The documentary evidence for any single explanation is weak, so most serious accounts decline to settle on one.
What is undisputed is that for most of the pre-Civil War period, no one outside the immediate area had any reason to know the island’s name meant anything at all. That isolation is exactly what made it useful to New York City once the Civil War broke out. In 1864, the island became a training ground for the United States Colored Troops, Black soldiers who volunteered to fight for the Union, and barracks were built at the southern end of the island to house them. The regiment that trained there served in Virginia and was present at the final defeat of Confederate forces under General Lee in April 1865.
It remains Hart Island’s earliest recorded use, before any burials, hospitals, or reformatories followed. At the same time, the Union built a prisoner-of-war camp on the island that could hold up to 5,000 Confederate prisoners. Conditions inside that camp, by every surviving account, were harsh. Men died there from disease and exposure and were buried on the island in what became Hart Island’s first graves, decades before the city planned to turn the place into a permanent cemetery.
A small number of Union soldiers who died while guarding them were also buried there. A large stone obelisk, erected in 1877 by the New York City Army Reserve, still stands today to mark a parcel of land dedicated to the soldiers, which has been emptied and moved twice since then, first in 1916 and again in 1941, to make room for the graves that would eventually surround it on all sides. The city officially purchased Hart Island on May 27, 1868, paying $75,000 to Edward Hunter in a deal driven by a problem New York’s government had been putting off for years. The city’s existing cemeteries, crowded in Manhattan and the nearest boroughs, were running out of space.
More urgently, the city had no dedicated place to bury the people no one wanted, the poor, the unidentified, and those who died without a family able or willing to claim their bodies. New York had already moved its unclaimed dead more than once by this point, relocating a potter’s field from a plot that is now part of Washington Square Park in the heart of Greenwich Village to a site that later became the main public library branch on Fifth Avenue. Each move was driven by the same underlying pressure: a growing city needed the land its dead occupied for something the living considered more valuable. The biblical term for the solution most growing cities settled on had already entered common use.
“Potter’s field,” from the Gospel account of a field bought with the silver of betrayal, fit for nothing but burying the dead. New York had already used several such sites, scattered and temporary, including part of what is now Washington Square Park. Hart Island was meant to be the permanent one. On April 20, 1869, the first burial took place.
The woman buried that day was Louisa Van Slyke, twenty-four years old, who died of yellow fever at Charity Hospital on what is now Roosevelt Island, and who, according to the death certificate issued by the city, had no family or friends to claim her. A work crew of inmates from nearby Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary ferried her simple wooden coffin across the water and lowered it into the ground. No funeral service was recorded. Her grave was marked with a numbered wooden stake, the same system that would later mark more than a million graves after hers.
She was not the first person ever buried on Hart Island. The Confederate prisoners earned that unhappy distinction years earlier. But she was the first burial in the system the city was formally establishing that day: the city cemetery. In the historical record, she became more than a footnote.
The woman whose unclaimed body opened, by coincidence, the largest public cemetery in the history of the United States. Mass burials in the systematic form the island is known for today, full trenches rather than individual graves, did not begin immediately with Van Slyke’s grave. At first, the city buried its unclaimed dead in individual graves, one body per plot, following the conventions of ordinary cemeteries even in a potter’s field. That changed within a few years as the volume of bodies coming from the city’s hospitals, asylums, and morgues outpaced the space and labor available to dig individual graves for each one.
By the mid-1870s, the trench system that would define Hart Island for the next century and a half had become standard practice. Long rectangles were dug, coffins placed in rows, covered, and left in a precise sequence so that, in theory, a specific burial could later be located using only a grid reference and a date. In practice, for roughly the first decades of the system’s operation, that theoretical traceability meant little to the families it was designed for, because the Department of Corrections, which took over responsibility for the cemetery shortly after it opened, treated the resulting grid maps as internal operational records rather than public information. For most of its history, Hart Island was not just a cemetery.
At different times, it was nearly everything the city government could not find a place for in a more visible location: a workhouse for men convicted of minor crimes; an industrial school for boys the city considered unreformable or undesirable; a psychiatric hospital; a tuberculosis sanatorium; a quarantine station during yellow fever outbreaks; a homeless shelter; a drug rehabilitation center; and, during the Cold War, a Nike missile base, part of the ring of air defenses the United States built around its major cities in anticipation of a Soviet attack. The reformatory deserves more than a passing mention, because it operated on Hart Island for most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and at its peak held about 2,000 boys and young men at once, along with a separate population of elderly and infirm prisoners transferred from Blackwell’s Island. The institution went through several names and several philosophies over the decades, beginning as an industrial school for what the language of that era called “incorrigible and rebellious boys,” then reorganized in 1905 under the more formal name of the Reformatory for Misdemeanants, housed in buildings originally constructed for the island’s women’s psychiatric hospital. Reformers who studied the institution at the time reported that the boys were housed in barracks without bars, taught trades including blacksmithing, shoemaking, and landscaping, and received a half-day of education alongside their assigned labor, which for many included burying the dead in the same trenches this video has already described.
Even advocates of that era, in their official reports, acknowledged that complaints of cruelty toward the boys held there were credible, and admitted in a phrase preserved in archival records that the institution had no real chance of succeeding at what it claimed to do. The reformatory on Hart Island closed in 1914, and its inmates were transferred to a rural facility in Orange County. Men’s prison labor on the island continued for decades after that, ending only in 1966, when the remaining inmates were absorbed into the now-dominant Rikers Island prison system a few miles south. That was not the last attempt to run a prison on Hart Island itself.
In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch reopened a small work camp there, assigning about 50 inmates to restore buildings that vandals had damaged during the years the island sat largely empty, housing them in the old barracks of the Cold War-era Nike missile base. City Island residents, a small fishing community located near Hart Island across the water, filed a lawsuit in 1985 specifically to stop the Department of Corrections from re-establishing any permanent inmate population there, and they won. The inmates left. The land that could have become a prison once more returned to what it had mostly been for a century by then: a place for burying the dead and nothing else.
There was even, briefly, an amusement park. In 1924, a Harlem real estate developer and entrepreneur named Solomon Riley bought 4 acres at the southern end of the island that the city had refused to purchase, and announced plans to build a resort for Black New Yorkers who, under the informal segregation of the time, were shut out of the beaches and parks of neighboring towns like Rye and Dobbs Ferry. Riley’s crew built a dance hall, eight guest houses, a 200-foot boardwalk, and converted an old ice barge into a bathhouse. Contemporary press coverage, written in the casual racism of that era’s journalism, covered Riley in tones that mixed genuine admiration for his entrepreneurial ambition with condescension typical of how white newspapers covered Black business success.
What the coverage did not dwell on was that Riley had correctly identified an entire class of New Yorkers who had no legal access to recreational beaches anywhere near the city, and built on 4 acres the city itself had rejected the only solution available to them within a reasonable train-and-ferry ride from Harlem. The press at the time called the project by a name that is no longer acceptable in storytelling today, “the Black Coney Island. ”
The project did not last long. It closed within a few years, and the land it stood on eventually returned to the same use as the rest of the island around it.
Riley himself continued developing other real estate projects in Harlem in later years, and the park’s brief existence survives today mostly as a curious historical footnote. Decades later, the same site of Riley’s dance hall would become the resting place of an entirely different set of graves, dug for reasons that had nothing to do with recreation and everything to do with fear. Through all these overlapping uses, burials never stopped, and the system for carrying them out barely changed for a century. Until 1913, unidentified adults were buried in individual graves, while identified adults and children were buried in common graves together.
That year, the city separated the trenches to make later exhumations easier. A practical decision that shaped how every subsequent burial was organized. Adults in one set of trenches, dug and refilled with a precise system. Children and infants in another.
Each grave holding up to 150 coffins stacked in three layers, two per row, with the exact location recorded on a grid map kept by the Department of Corrections with limited access for over a century. Consider the actual daily mechanics of the process, because the size of it is easy to state as a statistic and much harder to envision as a repeated, concrete operation. A body arrives at the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital. After the standard holding period passes unclaimed, the medical examiner’s office offers a chance for a family to come forward.
The body is released, placed in a simple pine coffin, and loaded onto a ferry owned by the Department of Corrections, the only regular transportation to and from the island, running on a schedule set by the agency itself rather than any public transit authority. On the island, a work crew, made up for most of the century entirely of Rikers inmates under armed corrections officers, unloads the coffins, moves them to the trench currently open for new burials, lowers them by hand, and stacks each one according to the same pattern governing the process since 1913. Rows of adult coffins, two across and three deep, up to 150 in a single trench before it is covered and the crew moves to the next. The men who dug those trenches, for almost the entire history of the cemetery, were prisoners.
Once Rikers Island opened in 1932, and especially after World War II consolidated what remained of the city’s jail population there, Rikers inmates were ferried across the water to Hart Island for digging and burial work, and periodically for exhumations when a family came forward years or decades after the fact. They worked for decades with no pay at all, and later for a wage set by the Department of Corrections at 50 cents an hour, a rate that continued with minor adjustments into the twenty-first century. It is worth being precise about a distinction that popular storytellers of this history often blur. The men who buried the dead on Hart Island were not being punished by that assignment in the formal disciplinary sense.
The work was simply a job assignment within the prison system, not a penalty imposed for misconduct. What made the arrangement troubling to the advocates who eventually fought to end it was not the cruelty of the labor itself in the manner of a punishment cell, but that the entire system depended on a disenfranchised, nearly voiceless workforce, accepting wages no free worker would accept, doing psychologically difficult work that would have cost the city far more had it been forced to hire outside contractors from the start. The work on the burial crew held a special status within the Rikers system, one outside observers found genuinely hard to classify as simple punishment. Inmates assigned to the grave-digging crew enjoyed, in a real sense, more freedom of movement and time outdoors than any other assignment the jail offered.
A day spent on a quiet, lightly supervised island rather than inside a crowded cell. Some crews developed their own informal culture around the work over the decades. Small rituals and unwritten rules about how to handle and lower a coffin passed from one cohort of inmates to the next. In a job with no formal training program and no written procedure manual beyond the simple operational requirements of management, some of the men who served on the crew described it in later interviews with words that acknowledged that trade-off directly.
Hard, sometimes disturbing work handling the bodies of strangers day after day, but also, however grimly, one of the only reliable ways to get out from behind the walls of Rikers for a few uninterrupted hours. That complexity, the unpaid or nearly unpaid labor that some of the men who did it described as better than the alternative, sits uncomfortably at the heart of the whole arrangement. It is part of why the advocates fighting to end the practice worded their arguments carefully. It was not that the men doing the digging were uniquely exploited compared to other work assignments at Rikers, but that burying the city’s dead should never have depended on cheap, confined inmate labor to be affordable at all.
In June 1983, the New York State Funeral Directors Association sent a notice to its members, a notice that would ultimately determine where hundreds of New Yorkers came to rest. The notice urged funeral homes not to embalm the bodies of people who had died of AIDS. The disease had barely been known to the public for two years at that point. Its modes of transmission were still poorly understood even by many doctors, and the fear surrounding it had already outpaced the science by a wide margin.
Private funeral homes across the city began, one after another, refusing to handle the bodies of AIDS victims entirely. Families who could have arranged private burials found themselves with nowhere to turn. Many of those bodies ended up on Hart Island. What happened next inside the Department of Corrections’ own operations is one of the most quietly devastating chapters in the island’s history.
Correction officers supervising the burial operations became afraid of handling the remains themselves, worried, without any scientific basis, that the body might still be able to transmit the virus after death. That fear was not limited to Hart Island or even to New York. Across the country in the early and mid-1980s, funeral directors, hospital staff, and even some doctors handled the bodies of AIDS patients with a level of caution far beyond anything the medical science of that era recommended. It reflected a broader cultural panic around the disease that mixed genuine uncertainty with outright homophobia, as the epidemic was overwhelmingly perceived in the public mind of that period as a disease of gay men specifically.
In that sense, the fourteen-foot-deep graves on Hart Island were not a deviation invented by a uniquely frightened agency, but a fairly ordinary expression of a fear that was widespread at the time across American institutions of all kinds. Instead of placing these dead in the ordinary common trenches alongside others, the department created a separate, fenced-off section at the southern end of the island, in the general area where Solomon Riley’s dance hall had stood six decades earlier, and buried each person there alone in an individual grave dug far deeper than the usual four-to-five-foot standard. Fourteen feet deep in some cases, the maximum depth the island’s excavation equipment was mechanically capable of reaching. At least 31 adults and one infant were buried this way between 1983 and 1986, separated even in death from the general population of the cemetery.
Their graves bear only a code instead of names. Researchers who uncovered the practice found that the Department of Corrections used an internal classification for this group of burials: “special case,” bureaucratic language that combined coldness and cruelty at once. One of the markers among them simply reads “SCB1,” 1985, meaning “Special Case Baby Number One. ” It memorializes the first known child to die of AIDS in New York City.
Buried alone fourteen feet underground, not yet a year old. The marker records no name, no birth date, nothing but the code and the year. The death statistics behind the ordinary trenches, entirely separate from the AIDS section, tell their own quiet story about who ends up on Hart Island and why. A New York Times review of city records found the cemetery received 1,419 burials in one recent year: 826 adults, 546 infants and stillbirths, and 47 sets of dismembered remains.
The last category, grimly, receives no further explanation in the city’s official paperwork. For most of the twentieth century, roughly half of the burials on the island were infants or stillborn fetuses. That proportion declined to closer to one in three only after New York State expanded Medicaid coverage to include all pregnant women in 1997, finally providing more mothers the medical and financial support to avoid losing a child to complications whose likelihood poverty alone had made far greater. The records identifying who was actually buried in those thirty-one graves were never found.
The stigma that put them there in the first place also erased, in most cases, any paper trail that might have led a family to find them. By 1987, once it became unambiguous that a corpse posed no risk of transmitting the virus, the Department of Corrections quietly abandoned the separate section and returned to burying AIDS victims in the same trenches as everyone else. No public announcement accompanied the reversal. There was no acknowledgment that the previous policy had rested on fear that the department’s own medical consultants could have corrected years earlier.
No apology was issued to the families of the thirty-one adults and one infant already buried in that separate, deeper section. The department simply stopped, and the section at the island’s southern end remained thereafter unmarked and largely unexplained for three decades, until researchers working with the Hart Island Project finally assembled information about what it was and who was likely buried there. But by then, the pattern of the epidemic had made Hart Island, by most historians’ estimates, the largest single burial ground for AIDS victims anywhere in the United States. Adult AIDS burials on the island continued in significant numbers into the following decade, as the crisis in New York City reached its devastating peak around 1989, long after the fourteen-foot graves stopped being dug, but long before the disease itself stopped filling the island’s ordinary trenches.
In 1991, photographer Joel Sternfeld and artist Melinda Hunt received rare permission to document the island, its burial operations, and the Rikers inmates who carried them out over a period spanning three years. What Hunt saw there would eventually turn her into the person most responsible for changing how Hart Island works at all. At the time, Hunt was in her early thirties, and by her own later account, what struck her most forcefully was not the scale of the burial operations themselves but how completely invisible the entire process was to the rest of the city. A place holding, even then, the remains of more than half a million people, a short ferry ride from some of the most documented and photographed areas on the planet, yet virtually unknown to almost anyone without a direct personal reason to seek it out.
She later wondered, she said, how such a place could exist entirely removed from public consciousness, and concluded that the obscurity was probably not accidental at all, but the product of a kind of institutional discomfort that keeps difficult subjects quietly out of sight. Melinda Hunt spent the next three decades of her life turning a three-year photographic project into an ongoing campaign to restore dignity to the dead of Hart Island. In 2011, working with the state, she gained access to the Department of Corrections’ burial records and began building what she called the “Living Cloud Museum,” an online database allowing anyone to search for a name, learn the grave location if it exists in the records, and, if they choose, contribute a story, photo, or memory of a person who would otherwise be reduced to a plot number in city files. Securing that access was itself a battle by Hunt’s later account, requiring years of persistent requests before the department agreed to release records that had been treated for a century and a half as internal operational data rather than as information the public, let alone the families involved, had a right to see.
By 2018, using drone photography, her organization, the Hart Island Project, had mapped the entire island and matched coordinates to more than 68,000 individual burial files. That aerial survey, conducted for purely archival and genealogical purposes, proved unexpectedly useful two years later when journalists covering the COVID-19 crisis needed to explain exactly what they were seeing in footage of a place none of them had ever documented before. Hunt’s quiet years of systematic mapping had produced, without anyone intending it, the closest thing to an authoritative public reference for a site the city itself had spent a century and a half avoiding describing in detail. The sheer scale of what that database eventually revealed is impossible to absorb at once, and it includes names that break through the anonymity in entirely unexpected ways.
Bobby Driscoll, the child actor who voiced Disney’s Peter Pan and won a special Oscar for juvenile performances before his career collapsed and his adult life slid into addiction, died alone in an abandoned East Village building in 1965, his body unclaimed for weeks. He was buried on Hart Island as a John Doe. His location was not confirmed until nineteen months later, when his mother sought help from acquaintances at Disney Studios to reach him before his father’s death, and fingerprint matching with the NYPD finally confirmed where he lay. Hunt’s artistic output about the island went far beyond the database itself.
She worked on compiling burial records and archival photographs, designed collages and installations, including a work in which she arranged small coffins, each bearing an embroidered blanket with the name of a person buried on the island, a tangible substitute for the anonymous grid coordinates that had for a century and a half been the only record most of these lives left in city documents. The installations traveled through galleries and museums outside New York, carrying the island’s history to audiences with no other reason to know it existed. Most of the people whose stories the Living Cloud Museum revealed were never famous, and that, in a real sense, is the entire point of the project. A woman named Carmen Vasquez lost four family members to AIDS and spent nearly twenty-nine years trying to determine where her mother was buried before finally discovering it was on Hart Island.
Twenty-nine years is not a number exaggerated in this video for dramatic effect. It is nearly a third of a century spent without knowing where her mother’s body actually lay. A gap in basic information that may seem nearly unbelievable to most Americans who have mourned a parent, and that Hart Island’s operating procedures made entirely ordinary for a specific, disproportionately poor and marginalized slice of New Yorkers. A woman named Elsie Soto was eight years old when her father Norberto died of AIDS-related complications in the Bronx in 1993.
She grew up not knowing where he was buried. When she finally learned decades later that her father was among the thousands of AIDS victims buried somewhere on the island, she described the discovery not as an end to the tragedy exactly, but as the first time in her adult life she had a specific place, rather than just an abstract idea, to direct her grief toward. Belinda Brzeska brought her children from Colorado to visit the grave of her father Felix, only to be told upon arrival that visits were not allowed that particular day. A small administrative failure, repeated across decades of access restrictions, sums up the entire history of how New York City treated the families of the people buried on this island.
A family who planned a trip across half the country, arranged travel for children who never knew their grandfather, arrived at a dock controlled by the prison system, only to be turned away with no real recourse but to try again on whatever limited schedule the Department of Corrections might offer later. Not every family who eventually learned where their relative was buried felt immediate comfort from the experience. Some visitors described the sheer scale of the place, with rows of identical numbered markers stretching across open land, as a kind of silent devastation. A scene demonstrating, in a way a single grave cannot, how many other families stood in almost the same spot asking almost the same questions.
Urban park rangers who now lead current public tours described seeing this interaction happen in real time. Visitors arriving expecting to visit a single grave, finding themselves standing at the edge of a field extending in some areas further than the eye can comfortably take in. Every marker identical. Every marker representing not one person but up to 150.
Others described a genuine sense of relief at simply having a fixed point on the map, however anonymous the ground itself remained, after years or decades of not knowing whether a relative’s remains existed anywhere they could find again. Hunt’s argument, made consistently for nearly thirty years through testimony, lawsuits, and advocacy, was direct and hard to refute once you actually looked at how the island worked. She argued that it was unjust, after reform finally came, that New York City had agreed to transfer jurisdiction of Hart Island after 150 years of prison control. She argued that families and friends of the people buried there should not have to go through the penal system just to visit a grave.
In November 2019, after years of advocacy by Hunt’s organization and a coalition of city council members, the New York City Council voted to approve legislation transferring jurisdiction of Hart Island entirely away from the Department of Corrections to the Department of Parks and Recreation in partnership with the city’s Department of Human Resources. The formal transfer of authority took effect on December 4, 2019, ending 150 years of carceral control over the largest municipal cemetery in the country. Four months later, before the new arrangement had changed anything meaningful in the island’s daily operations, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and Hart Island suddenly mattered to the entire world in a way it never had before. By early spring 2020, New York City’s death toll from COVID-19 was rising faster than the city’s private funeral infrastructure could absorb.
Funeral homes across the five boroughs were overwhelmed. Refrigerated trucks were pressed into service outside hospitals to store bodies awaiting processing, and city officials quietly began preparing Hart Island for what a spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office cautiously described as an emergency measure. The stated policy was that only New Yorkers whose families had not claimed their bodies would be buried there, the same standard the island had operated under for 150 years. In practice, the sheer speed of the crisis meant unclaimed bodies were arriving faster than the system was designed to process even in ordinary times.
Burial rates that hovered around 24 per week in normal years rose to as many as 24 per day. It was at this very moment, with burial crews working at a pace the island had not seen since the peaks of earlier epidemics, that Rikers inmates who had dug the graves here for much of a century, in large numbers, began refusing the assignment. The Department of Corrections initially raised the pay rate from the 50-cents-an-hour figure that had stood for decades to $6 an hour, an acknowledgment, however belated, that the job asked of these men carried real risks they had never been compensated to accept. It was not enough to keep the operation running at the pace the pandemic demanded.
Within weeks, the city shifted burial work to private contractors for the first time in the cemetery’s modern history, ending, for practical rather than ethical reasons, the tradition of inmate labor that had buried more than half of the island’s one million graves. The crisis also exposed a bottleneck with nothing directly to do with Hart Island but everything to do with how much the city’s entire death-processing infrastructure depended on the island as an invisible safety valve. In May 2021, more than a year into the pandemic, the city’s chief medical examiner publicly acknowledged that the remains of about 750 COVID-19 victims were still being held in refrigerated trucks, unclaimed or unprocessed, more than a year after the first wave overwhelmed the system. Some of those remains would end up on Hart Island too, a slow echo of the very crisis the drone footage captured at its most acute and visible stage a year earlier.
The Reuters drone footage that opened this video, the trench, the protective suits, the small excavator lowering coffin after coffin into the earth, was filmed during exactly this period, and reached an audience larger than anything the island had produced in 150 years of continuous operation. For most people who watched that footage spread across the internet in April 2020, it was the first time they had ever learned Hart Island existed at all. For the families of the people already buried there, it was the first time in a century and a half that the rest of the world was forced to look at what New York City had always quietly done with its unclaimed dead. The footage also produced, almost immediately, its own wave of confusion and misinformation, as some online viewers mistook Hart Island’s ordinary, decades-old operating procedures, individual coffins in a trench buried according to a numbered grid, for evidence of something more sinister: bodies being disposed of en masse with no tracking or dignity whatsoever.
Reporters covering the story in the following weeks found themselves working as hard to explain what the island had always done as to explain what the pandemic had specifically changed about it. The pandemic accelerated a change that had already begun years earlier. In October 2021, the Department of Corrections formally transferred visitor services and daily management of Hart Island to the Department of Parks, completing the process begun by the 2019 legislation. For the first time in 150 years, New Yorkers wishing to visit a relative’s grave no longer needed to apply through the same agency that runs the city’s jails.
The change in practice was significant. Under the old system, families could schedule visits on only two days per month, arriving at a designated dock where Department of Corrections staff would search them, confiscate their phones and other belongings, and escort them under supervision for the entire visit. Under the Parks Department, the island began offering free public walking tours led by urban park rangers, expanded the visiting schedule considerably, and for the first time began allowing ordinary members of the public with no connection to anyone buried there to come and see the place, not just the immediate relatives of the dead. More than 1,900 family members visited the island in the years immediately following the transfer, according to city figures, a number unimaginable under the restrictions of the previous century and a half.
Compare that figure to roughly one million people buried on the island across its entire history, and the gap becomes a statistic worth contemplating on its own. Even after reform, even after the transfer, even after three decades of advocacy that finally produced a workable visitation system, fewer than 2,000 families found their way to a specific grave in the years immediately following. A reminder of how much of the million remains, for practical purposes, unclaimed on a permanent basis by anyone still alive who might come looking for them. The change in tone that came with Parks Department management extended even to how the island’s public-facing programs described themselves.
Where Corrections materials had for decades framed the island primarily around security procedures and restricted access, Parks Department tours actively guide visitors through sites such as the AIDS burial ground and the ruins of the old reformatory, treating the island’s difficult history as something to be explained and contextualized rather than avoided. Urban park rangers now walk groups through the same grounds Melinda Hunt once had to negotiate for special, limited access just to photograph. A shift in institutional attitude that took three decades of sustained advocacy to achieve. What the Parks Department inherited, however, was not just an administrative headache.
It was 131 acres of crumbling nineteenth- and twentieth-century infrastructure, an abandoned reformatory building, remnants of Cold War missile facilities, a church unused for its original purpose for decades, and a cemetery still receiving new burials at a rate of nearly 1,100 people per year even as the agency now managing it simultaneously tries to turn the same ground into something approaching a public park. No other agency in the Parks Department’s portfolio, not the city’s largest urban forests, not its busiest waterfront parks, offered this combination of obligations: maintaining an active burial ground for the city’s poorest residents, preserving 160 years of significant institutional history, and opening the site fully to the public, all in the same space at the same time, on a budget that had to be negotiated from scratch because no comparable precedent existed in the city parks system. In summer 2025, the Parks Department released a 20-year future plan for the island, at an estimated cost of about $130 million, including a visitor center with running water and proper restrooms instead of portable toilets, adaptive reuse of the historic church as a memorial space, shoreline stabilization against erosion, and forest restoration in parts of the site. On October 16, 2025, the New York City Council held a formal oversight hearing on the proposal, alongside separate legislation calling for a rigorous study of the island’s remaining cemetery capacity.
A 2022 city study estimated that unused land on the island could provide between 7,000 and 10,000 additional burial places, extending the cemetery’s life by 8 to 12 years at current burial rates, or longer up to 69 years if derelict structures were removed. That range, from 8 years at its minimum to seven decades at its maximum, depends entirely on a policy decision about demolishing the reformatory buildings, missile installations, and workhouse ruins that have sat derelict for half a century, and it encapsulates the tension in the current planning process: whether Hart Island’s future should prioritize its function as a working burial ground for the city’s poorest residents or its emerging identity as a historic site worth preserving in its current decaying state. No one involved in the current planning process has publicly proposed simply closing the cemetery and finding another location altogether, an option the city has quietly ruled out, largely for the same reason that created Hart Island in the first place. There is no other place in the five boroughs’ expensive real estate that can accommodate 131 acres devoted entirely to burying people no one wants to bury.
The financial dimension of the current planning struggle deserves to be stated plainly, because $130 million is a significant amount to spend on cemetery infrastructure most taxpayers have never visited and only recently knew existed. Supporters of the plan argue the investment is long overdue by any reasonable standard, to correct infrastructure gaps. There is no running water anywhere on a 131-acre public site, something considered unacceptable at any other city-run facility of comparable size. Critics, balancing competing demands on the city’s capital budget, have questioned whether this level of investment is appropriate for an island whose primary users, by their very nature, will not be enjoying a welcome center or appreciating a restored church.
Both positions were represented at the Council hearing in October 2025, and neither had produced a final, binding budget commitment as of the time this video was prepared. The church itself, selected in the Parks Department’s 2025 concept plan for adaptive reuse as a memorial space, is one of the few structures on the island with any hope of continuing its original spiritual purpose, if not its exact form, in whatever the island ultimately becomes. Built decades ago to serve the reformatory and workhouse populations who once lived on these grounds, it has sat largely unused since those institutions closed. Its stained glass and modest brick facade deteriorate slowly alongside every other derelict building on the island.
Restoring it as a place where visiting families can sit, reflect, and hold some kind of ceremony for a relative buried in an unmarked trench a short distance away would, by any measure, be one of the most productive uses the city could find for a building that has spent half a century as another of the many ruins. That is the strange, unresolved position Hart Island occupies now, as of the time this video was prepared: simultaneously an active cemetery still burying more than a thousand New Yorkers a year, a historic site with a hundred and fifty years of institutional history layered onto one narrow strip of land, and a city council budget item still being debated in committee over how many more decades of the dead it is expected to accommodate. Stepping back from Hart Island, it connects directly to an institution this channel has already covered in full, and the connection is not incidental. For nearly a century, the men digging these graves came from Rikers Island, a few miles south across the same body of water.
The largest jail complex in the country, holding mostly people who have not been convicted of anything at all. Hart Island was, for most of its existence, the quiet extension across the water of that same institution. The same men, waiting for trial on one island, buried the city’s forgotten dead on the other for 50 cents an hour. That link is the pattern this channel has now traced across dozens of American institutions, applied here to something more fundamental than a jail or an asylum.
Every institution this channel has covered ultimately had to answer the same basic question about the people inside them: who has the right to know what is really happening here, and who gets to decide when that finally changes? Hart Island answered that question by placing an entire agency and a century and a half of institutional custom between the public and the dead. It took an artist with a camera, working essentially alone through the early years of her project, to begin opening that door again. Someone has to bury the people no one else claims.
New York City decided, a century and a half ago, that the solution to this problem was an island most of its residents would never see, run by the same agency that runs its jails, dug by men who had no choice in the work, paid almost nothing for it. The dead accumulated, one million of them, in trenches dug in precise rotation, marked with numbers instead of names, while the city built and neglected an amusement park, a missile base, a tuberculosis ward, and a reformatory school on the same ground. Institution after institution stacked itself atop the same open graves. What finally changed the situation was not a court order or a scandal, though both played a role in the end.
It was a photographer and an artist, granted three years of access in 1991, who spent the next three decades turning 68,000 anonymous burial records into something the families of the dead could actually search, name by name, until the accumulated weight of those documents became impossible for the city to keep treating as a mere appendage of its jail system. The lawsuits that ultimately contributed to reform, many filed on behalf of families denied access to a relative’s grave, also mattered. City council members who sponsored the 2019 transfer legislation credited this combination, documented advocacy on one side and mounting legal pressure on the other, with finally making the political cost of inaction higher than the political cost of change. The graves are still there.
The island still receives new dead, more than a thousand annually, and the Parks Department’s own projections indicate it will keep receiving them for decades to come, whether the surrounding rubble is removed or not. That is the plain, unglamorous truth underneath every reform this video has described. The jurisdictional transfer changed who controls access to the graves and how families are treated when they arrive. It did not change, and never could have changed, the underlying reality that New York City still needs a place to put the people no one claims.
And that place remains, and will remain for the foreseeable future, this same narrow island in Long Island Sound. But for the first time in 150 years, a family that wants to stand over the exact spot where a loved one is buried can do so without first passing through a metal detector, without handing over their phones, without asking permission from the same department that runs the jail where their loved one may have spent time before ever needing a grave. The population buried on Hart Island has itself changed in ways that complicate any simple story about who ends up there. For most of the cemetery’s history, the assumption, reasonable enough given the circumstances, was that the people buried there were mostly the city’s poorest and most marginalized residents, the genuinely destitute, the completely unidentified.
Reporting in the 2020s made that picture significantly more complicated. The Washington Post, reviewing recent burial records, found that people buried on Hart Island in recent years included a professional ballet dancer, a nurse, and a software engineer. People who had jobs, families, and apparent means of living, yet ended up on the island anyway. Sometimes because the family could not afford the reduced-cost private burial the city offers as an alternative.
Other times, according to advocates who studied the pattern, because grieving relatives were not adequately informed that free public burial on Hart Island was an option with lasting, and until recently nearly irreversible, consequences for how easily that grave could be visited later. Louisa Van Slyke has been buried on Hart Island for 157 years now, longer than the Statue of Liberty has stood in the harbor a short distance to the south, longer than the New York City subway has run beneath the streets of the borough where she died. She was the first. She will not be the last, not for decades, perhaps not for most of a century.
Somewhere on that island now, in a trench dug in precise rotation, there is space already allocated for people who have not yet died, on ground that has been receiving New York City’s forgotten dead since before the invention of the electric light bulb, and shows no sign, according to the city’s own planning documents, of stopping any time soon.