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NEW YORK (TNA) – Three to four mornings a week a large white delivery truck pops over a small hill on Fordham Street in City Island, the Bronx, and rolls to a stop in front of a 12-foot chain-link gate marked “Prison: Keep Out.” From his vantage the driver spies a rusting white metal ferry slip and, amidst the slow-moving navy blue of Long Island Sound, a thin, tree-lined island. As he waits for a worker to swing open the gate his truck betrays its grisly cargo.
“It stops right here, and sometimes it really stinks,” says Papo Ramirez, 37, unhitching a jet ski trailer yards away from the Department of Corrections-run gate. “I call it the meat truck, because that’s what they bring: dead bodies.”
An American dies every 12 seconds, and, as 200,000 corpses go unclaimed or handed over for state disposal every year, cities must decide how to handle the constant stream. In Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles the bodies are cremated, usually after 30 days. Philadelphia, which maintained a city cemetery until it ran out of space in the 1980’s, cremates as well, then stores the ashes on shelves, often for decades.
Although propriety and public health have required it since the Dutch bought Manhattan, New York State Social Services Law has since 1941 legally compelled the city to provide for the care, removal, and burial of those who are found dead and unclaimed or would have been supported by public assistance in life and have no relatives capable of doing so in death.
The city’s history with the dead and untethered is rich and reliably unsettling. New York City honored the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826 with a gala celebration in Washington Square, which served as the city’s public burial grounds, or “potter’s field,” at the time. And as Charles King told the mechanics society annual gathering in 1951, when that famed Greenwich Village plaza was transformed into a park in 1827, it:
“was not called to give up its nameless and numberless dead; but on their unconscious remains were piled acres of sand,…; and the fine houses which now surround the square, and the flourishing trees which adorn it, cover the dust, far down, which once was breathing, living man.”
Like the poor it contains, New York's Potter's Field has been pushed regularly to the edges of urban development: from Washington to Madison Square in 1827; to the current Bryant Park a few years later and on to the site of the Waldorf Astoria; off Manhattan to Randall’s Island in 1838, then to Ward’s Island in 1860. That latter locale inspired Amos J. Cummings, future editor of the New York Sun and Tammany Hall Congressman, to wax Gothic in an 1866 report:
The paupers, the fever-stricken emigrants, the rag-pickers, the unknown and destitute strangers and the abandoned female on the last round of life’s ladder…are bounced into a pine coffin, and are sent to the Potter’s Field….the name itself strikes a sudden terror to the hearts of the corrupt butterflies holding high revel in the magnificent bagnios of the city.
Such apprehensions are not surprising considering the ways of this underworld. Cummings goes on to describe a scene of some 15 Irishmen continually waging battle with immense and ferocious rats while endeavoring to dig twenty-foot-deep trenches, and details the graveyard’s supply of cadavers for the city's medical colleges, wherein “sundry boats” creep to the water’s edge in the dark of night to receive “ghastly freight.” Found dead without papers after running away from his country, Italian Count Lerna Lavejoys, an extravagantly wealthy young heir, is trundled off to the isle’s heaps, Cummings recounts, days before distinguished family members arrive to identify him:
His parents offered $10,000 for the recovery of his body, but the hot air of July had thrown the pile of rotting corpses into such an odious state of putrefaction that its recovery was impossible, the corpse being on one of the lowest tiers. It would have required the removal of over a thousand festering bodies to have reached that of the young Count, supposing it to have escaped the dissecting knife.
Neither body-snatching nor necrophilia was criminalized in the U.S. until 1965. No surprise, then, that the Department of Corrections maintains tight security to this day, not just on Hart Island but from the minute the bodies arrive at the morgue.
“They come straight to us if they are unknown or if the death is in any way suspicious,” says Ellen Borakove, director of public affairs for two decades at the Medical Examiner’s Office, which receives over 5000 bodies annually. “That means if they were stabbed, shot, strangled, died in a car accident, fell during work – whatever – we get ‘em.”
Unknown arrivals at New York City morgues—there is one in each borough—are dubbed Jane or John Doe. Yet the real names of almost 90 percent of those buried in Hart Island are known.
“The main reason people end up in Hart is not, as many folks believe, that they are unknown,” points out Department of Corrections Director of Historical Services Thomas C. McCarthy, who has worked with the DOC for a decade, “but because the bodies go unclaimed.”
After twenty-four unclaimed hours in the morgue, the city puts the gears of burial preparation in motion, beginning with a new name that corresponds to borough and annual sequencing. [K07 Case #38, for example, was the thirty-eighth person to die in Kings County, a.k.a. Brooklyn, in 2007.] After a week without word from the police or next of kin the examiner’s office applies to the Department of Health for a burial permit—every corpse interred within city limits requires one. If the police suspect foul play or are investigating a homicide they will advise the morgue to hold on to the body for up to a week.
Some Corrections officials would like the police department to post photos of all of the new unidentified bodies at the morgue on its website, as it did until 2001 “so Uncle Willie didn’t show up at Thanksgiving dinner and get roaring drunk, and the family is starting to wonder where he is,” explained one official.
“Why not ask around, check the police website?” the official added. “A family could find the picture of their relative there and claim the body. I don’t know why they stopped doing it – it can’t hurt.”
Instead, the police rely on missing persons bulletins and fingerprinting searches—local, state, and national—to track down kin. After two weeks, all corpses still unidentified or unclaimed are readied for a Hart Island burial.
Catholic and Protestant priests will perform final rites if the rites are requested and arranged for by a family member or friend of the deceased. Rabbis rarely if ever work the morgue. (The Hebrew Free Burial Society uses charitable donations to provide for the internment of all indigent Jews within the city limits. Since 1888, over 50,000 unfortunates have been buried in the Mount Richmond Cemetery in Staten Island, the largest free burial ground in the Jewish Diaspora.)
The unknown are photographed and interred with all their belongings for identification purposes. Burial certificates chemically treated to last up to twenty-five years are pasted inside and on top of each coffin. Finally the decedents are zipped into black body bags, sealed in waterproofed pine coffins and loaded onto a morgue wagon headed for that slip at the end of Fordham Street.
The Michael Cosgrove, a squeaky clean, orange and black Department of Transportation ferry, receives its grim payload then chugs the quarter-mile across the Sound. Although scenes from several recent films were shot on the island, including 1993's “The Saint of Fort Washington” and the 2000 schlock horror “Island of the Dead,” trespassers today get slapped with a $600 fine and up to months six months in jail.
Since “you can’t hide a flea on that ferry,” according to McCarthy, and only those with proof of a relative among the buried can gain visiting rights, the spot where Ramirez works is as close as one can get to New York City’s Potter's Field without being deceased and unclaimed.
From a distance, the one-mile-long, check mark-shaped Hart Island looks appropriately lifeless, if not entirely forbidding: Brown, barren trees, yellowing grasses and dark, rocky outcroppings skirt the shoreline, and several red-brick buildings with chipping paint and broken windows stand empty and derelict.
A stroll around the isle, which has no living human inhabitants, would turn up some unexpected scraps of Americana: bleacher seats from Ebbets Field, which were installed as part of a ballpark for prisoners and juveniles and then left after its demolition; steel train ties from the Third Avenue elevated line; a cemetery for Union soldiers; a dilapidated brick barracks, which during WWII held the three soldier crew of a German U-boat captured in Long Island Sound; and the only NIKE missile base within the city limits, complete with silos and ventilation shafts – it was shuttered in 1961 after the USSR shifted to ballistic weapons.
British naval cartographers first charted the ancestral home of the Siwanoy Indians as Heart Island in 1775, when it was under the ownership of Oliver DeLancey. Two years later “Hart Island” appeared on a local map and subsequent versions maintained the corruption. The speck gained some renown on August 29, 1842, when ten steamboats and dozens of smaller crafts ferried over 6,000 boxing fans across the Sound to watch a bare knuckle grudge match on the island. Hometown hero James “Yankee” Sullivan bludgeoned William Bell throughout the twenty-four round, thirty-eight minute slugfest, winning a $300 purse and igniting boxing enthusiasm across New York.
During the Civil War, the federal government took possession of the island and built the Hart Island training facility, a warren of barracks and administrative buildings that supported, at its peak, 2,000 to 3,000 residents, quarters for various staff, a library, and a concert hall, which was raucously inaugurated in November 1864 by Mr. Riley’s Regimental Band.
Most experts trace the origins of the term “potter’s field” to the twenty-seventh book of the Gospel of St. Matthew, when, after Judas has thrown down the money he made for betraying Jesus, the chief priests gather the coins and buy the land where a potter used to work and convert it into a burial ground for strangers.
In 1868 it was not priests but the City of New York that purchased Hart Island for $75,000 and designated 45 acres at the north end for a graveyard. On April 20th of the following year, Potter's Field was christened with the body of Louisa Van Slyke, born at sea and died alone at age 24 in Charity Hospital on Welfare Island. Over 800,000 have followed, making Hart America’s densest graveyard.
Nonviolent prisoners from Riker's begin the burial process by removing cadavers from the morgue wagon. The Ghoul Squad, or Death Patrol, as they call themselves, inscribe the coffins with the names of the deceased in indelible crayon before digging eight-foot deep, 15-by-40 burial trenches. The prisoners get paid 50 cents an hour and are happy for the work.
“If you’re an inmate in a dull, dark jail, you definitely like working on Hart,” says Tom Antenen, former Deputy Commissioner for Public Information in the Corrections Department. “You’re off Rikers, you’re outdoors. I bet these guys think it’s paradise.” Not surprisingly, a year-long waiting list of Hart volunteers has formed.
The grave site is marked not with tombstones or individual indicators but a sparse grid of eighteen-inch high white stone markers, which replaced wood after brush fires in 1903 and 1904. Each mass grave will ultimately contain 150 adults stacked three high, or an adjustable total of infants, children, and appendages buried seven deep in smaller boxes.
Despite its teeming turf, the cemetery is in little danger of filling up.
“I suspect they’re approaching a million bodies,” says McCarthy, noting that the workers recently started clearing additional burial space near the abandoned village. “Yet I don’t see them running out of space in the foreseeable future.”
Burials have decreased steadily over the past half century, from 8,000 in 1966, to 2000 in 1994 and about 1200 in 2006. McCarthy attributes not only improved prenatal care, a booming economy, and better public health for the twenty-five percent drop over the last decade, but also something more ubiquitous.
“I would think the big key is communications—isn’t ours the communication era?” he said. “Information about the unclaimed dead spreads so much more quickly and efficiently now, and bodies are going unclaimed less often as a result.”
Still, the regularity of burial remains such that the church group of St. Benedict’s Parish in the Bronx, with a special DOC dispensation, visits annually on Ascension Thursday to pray for the new arrivals. The visitors pray near a ten-foot stone cross of gun-metal gray near the center of the graveyard. Its thick, square based is inscribed: “He calleth His own by name.”
But some wonder if Hart is a fitting end for His own. The Interfaith Friends of Potter’s Field, an advocacy group of homeless and indigent, has fought for easier visitors' access, better identification methods, and improved burial conditions since its founding in 2003.
“The way the poor and homeless are handled after they die in New York City is not the only insult the poor face,” proclaims a statement on their website, “but it's the final insult.”
Yet a woman who grew up on the island, where her father was prison superintendent, disagrees.
“My heart will be there forever,” wrote Judy from Virginia in an online forum for New York immigrants. “The poor and the homeless have the one thing that I want the most and can't have: a beautiful place to rest in peace.”
Historically speaking, New York's wealthy beg to differ. Edwin G. Burrows, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gotham: A History of New York to 1898,” recalls the advent of swish alternatives like Brooklyn’s private Greenwood Cemetery.
“The original idea was to create a place where the well-to-do could rest in peace without having to rub elbows, as it were, with the riff-raff,” he says.
Unable to avoid such ignominious elbow rubbing were acclaimed novelist Dawn Powell, who found her corporeal self in Hart Island turf after consigning her body to science and dying of colon cancer in 1965, and Academy Award-winning actor Bobby Driscoll, found dead at age 31 from a drug overdose in his East Side tenement in 1968.
But if friends and family were scandalized, perhaps the living place too much emphasis on the final resting place.
On the possibility of being buried at Hart, Burrows is curt: “I would feel no different than I would buried anywhere else — dead."
“It stops right here, and sometimes it really stinks,” says Papo Ramirez, 37, unhitching a jet ski trailer yards away from the Department of Corrections-run gate. “I call it the meat truck, because that’s what they bring: dead bodies.”
An American dies every 12 seconds, and, as 200,000 corpses go unclaimed or handed over for state disposal every year, cities must decide how to handle the constant stream. In Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles the bodies are cremated, usually after 30 days. Philadelphia, which maintained a city cemetery until it ran out of space in the 1980’s, cremates as well, then stores the ashes on shelves, often for decades.
Although propriety and public health have required it since the Dutch bought Manhattan, New York State Social Services Law has since 1941 legally compelled the city to provide for the care, removal, and burial of those who are found dead and unclaimed or would have been supported by public assistance in life and have no relatives capable of doing so in death.
The city’s history with the dead and untethered is rich and reliably unsettling. New York City honored the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826 with a gala celebration in Washington Square, which served as the city’s public burial grounds, or “potter’s field,” at the time. And as Charles King told the mechanics society annual gathering in 1951, when that famed Greenwich Village plaza was transformed into a park in 1827, it:
“was not called to give up its nameless and numberless dead; but on their unconscious remains were piled acres of sand,…; and the fine houses which now surround the square, and the flourishing trees which adorn it, cover the dust, far down, which once was breathing, living man.”
Like the poor it contains, New York's Potter's Field has been pushed regularly to the edges of urban development: from Washington to Madison Square in 1827; to the current Bryant Park a few years later and on to the site of the Waldorf Astoria; off Manhattan to Randall’s Island in 1838, then to Ward’s Island in 1860. That latter locale inspired Amos J. Cummings, future editor of the New York Sun and Tammany Hall Congressman, to wax Gothic in an 1866 report:
The paupers, the fever-stricken emigrants, the rag-pickers, the unknown and destitute strangers and the abandoned female on the last round of life’s ladder…are bounced into a pine coffin, and are sent to the Potter’s Field….the name itself strikes a sudden terror to the hearts of the corrupt butterflies holding high revel in the magnificent bagnios of the city.
Such apprehensions are not surprising considering the ways of this underworld. Cummings goes on to describe a scene of some 15 Irishmen continually waging battle with immense and ferocious rats while endeavoring to dig twenty-foot-deep trenches, and details the graveyard’s supply of cadavers for the city's medical colleges, wherein “sundry boats” creep to the water’s edge in the dark of night to receive “ghastly freight.” Found dead without papers after running away from his country, Italian Count Lerna Lavejoys, an extravagantly wealthy young heir, is trundled off to the isle’s heaps, Cummings recounts, days before distinguished family members arrive to identify him:
His parents offered $10,000 for the recovery of his body, but the hot air of July had thrown the pile of rotting corpses into such an odious state of putrefaction that its recovery was impossible, the corpse being on one of the lowest tiers. It would have required the removal of over a thousand festering bodies to have reached that of the young Count, supposing it to have escaped the dissecting knife.
Neither body-snatching nor necrophilia was criminalized in the U.S. until 1965. No surprise, then, that the Department of Corrections maintains tight security to this day, not just on Hart Island but from the minute the bodies arrive at the morgue.
“They come straight to us if they are unknown or if the death is in any way suspicious,” says Ellen Borakove, director of public affairs for two decades at the Medical Examiner’s Office, which receives over 5000 bodies annually. “That means if they were stabbed, shot, strangled, died in a car accident, fell during work – whatever – we get ‘em.”
Unknown arrivals at New York City morgues—there is one in each borough—are dubbed Jane or John Doe. Yet the real names of almost 90 percent of those buried in Hart Island are known.
“The main reason people end up in Hart is not, as many folks believe, that they are unknown,” points out Department of Corrections Director of Historical Services Thomas C. McCarthy, who has worked with the DOC for a decade, “but because the bodies go unclaimed.”
After twenty-four unclaimed hours in the morgue, the city puts the gears of burial preparation in motion, beginning with a new name that corresponds to borough and annual sequencing. [K07 Case #38, for example, was the thirty-eighth person to die in Kings County, a.k.a. Brooklyn, in 2007.] After a week without word from the police or next of kin the examiner’s office applies to the Department of Health for a burial permit—every corpse interred within city limits requires one. If the police suspect foul play or are investigating a homicide they will advise the morgue to hold on to the body for up to a week.
Some Corrections officials would like the police department to post photos of all of the new unidentified bodies at the morgue on its website, as it did until 2001 “so Uncle Willie didn’t show up at Thanksgiving dinner and get roaring drunk, and the family is starting to wonder where he is,” explained one official.
“Why not ask around, check the police website?” the official added. “A family could find the picture of their relative there and claim the body. I don’t know why they stopped doing it – it can’t hurt.”
Instead, the police rely on missing persons bulletins and fingerprinting searches—local, state, and national—to track down kin. After two weeks, all corpses still unidentified or unclaimed are readied for a Hart Island burial.
Catholic and Protestant priests will perform final rites if the rites are requested and arranged for by a family member or friend of the deceased. Rabbis rarely if ever work the morgue. (The Hebrew Free Burial Society uses charitable donations to provide for the internment of all indigent Jews within the city limits. Since 1888, over 50,000 unfortunates have been buried in the Mount Richmond Cemetery in Staten Island, the largest free burial ground in the Jewish Diaspora.)
The unknown are photographed and interred with all their belongings for identification purposes. Burial certificates chemically treated to last up to twenty-five years are pasted inside and on top of each coffin. Finally the decedents are zipped into black body bags, sealed in waterproofed pine coffins and loaded onto a morgue wagon headed for that slip at the end of Fordham Street.
The Michael Cosgrove, a squeaky clean, orange and black Department of Transportation ferry, receives its grim payload then chugs the quarter-mile across the Sound. Although scenes from several recent films were shot on the island, including 1993's “The Saint of Fort Washington” and the 2000 schlock horror “Island of the Dead,” trespassers today get slapped with a $600 fine and up to months six months in jail.
Since “you can’t hide a flea on that ferry,” according to McCarthy, and only those with proof of a relative among the buried can gain visiting rights, the spot where Ramirez works is as close as one can get to New York City’s Potter's Field without being deceased and unclaimed.
From a distance, the one-mile-long, check mark-shaped Hart Island looks appropriately lifeless, if not entirely forbidding: Brown, barren trees, yellowing grasses and dark, rocky outcroppings skirt the shoreline, and several red-brick buildings with chipping paint and broken windows stand empty and derelict.
A stroll around the isle, which has no living human inhabitants, would turn up some unexpected scraps of Americana: bleacher seats from Ebbets Field, which were installed as part of a ballpark for prisoners and juveniles and then left after its demolition; steel train ties from the Third Avenue elevated line; a cemetery for Union soldiers; a dilapidated brick barracks, which during WWII held the three soldier crew of a German U-boat captured in Long Island Sound; and the only NIKE missile base within the city limits, complete with silos and ventilation shafts – it was shuttered in 1961 after the USSR shifted to ballistic weapons.
British naval cartographers first charted the ancestral home of the Siwanoy Indians as Heart Island in 1775, when it was under the ownership of Oliver DeLancey. Two years later “Hart Island” appeared on a local map and subsequent versions maintained the corruption. The speck gained some renown on August 29, 1842, when ten steamboats and dozens of smaller crafts ferried over 6,000 boxing fans across the Sound to watch a bare knuckle grudge match on the island. Hometown hero James “Yankee” Sullivan bludgeoned William Bell throughout the twenty-four round, thirty-eight minute slugfest, winning a $300 purse and igniting boxing enthusiasm across New York.
During the Civil War, the federal government took possession of the island and built the Hart Island training facility, a warren of barracks and administrative buildings that supported, at its peak, 2,000 to 3,000 residents, quarters for various staff, a library, and a concert hall, which was raucously inaugurated in November 1864 by Mr. Riley’s Regimental Band.
Most experts trace the origins of the term “potter’s field” to the twenty-seventh book of the Gospel of St. Matthew, when, after Judas has thrown down the money he made for betraying Jesus, the chief priests gather the coins and buy the land where a potter used to work and convert it into a burial ground for strangers.
In 1868 it was not priests but the City of New York that purchased Hart Island for $75,000 and designated 45 acres at the north end for a graveyard. On April 20th of the following year, Potter's Field was christened with the body of Louisa Van Slyke, born at sea and died alone at age 24 in Charity Hospital on Welfare Island. Over 800,000 have followed, making Hart America’s densest graveyard.
Nonviolent prisoners from Riker's begin the burial process by removing cadavers from the morgue wagon. The Ghoul Squad, or Death Patrol, as they call themselves, inscribe the coffins with the names of the deceased in indelible crayon before digging eight-foot deep, 15-by-40 burial trenches. The prisoners get paid 50 cents an hour and are happy for the work.
“If you’re an inmate in a dull, dark jail, you definitely like working on Hart,” says Tom Antenen, former Deputy Commissioner for Public Information in the Corrections Department. “You’re off Rikers, you’re outdoors. I bet these guys think it’s paradise.” Not surprisingly, a year-long waiting list of Hart volunteers has formed.
The grave site is marked not with tombstones or individual indicators but a sparse grid of eighteen-inch high white stone markers, which replaced wood after brush fires in 1903 and 1904. Each mass grave will ultimately contain 150 adults stacked three high, or an adjustable total of infants, children, and appendages buried seven deep in smaller boxes.
Despite its teeming turf, the cemetery is in little danger of filling up.
“I suspect they’re approaching a million bodies,” says McCarthy, noting that the workers recently started clearing additional burial space near the abandoned village. “Yet I don’t see them running out of space in the foreseeable future.”
Burials have decreased steadily over the past half century, from 8,000 in 1966, to 2000 in 1994 and about 1200 in 2006. McCarthy attributes not only improved prenatal care, a booming economy, and better public health for the twenty-five percent drop over the last decade, but also something more ubiquitous.
“I would think the big key is communications—isn’t ours the communication era?” he said. “Information about the unclaimed dead spreads so much more quickly and efficiently now, and bodies are going unclaimed less often as a result.”
Still, the regularity of burial remains such that the church group of St. Benedict’s Parish in the Bronx, with a special DOC dispensation, visits annually on Ascension Thursday to pray for the new arrivals. The visitors pray near a ten-foot stone cross of gun-metal gray near the center of the graveyard. Its thick, square based is inscribed: “He calleth His own by name.”
But some wonder if Hart is a fitting end for His own. The Interfaith Friends of Potter’s Field, an advocacy group of homeless and indigent, has fought for easier visitors' access, better identification methods, and improved burial conditions since its founding in 2003.
“The way the poor and homeless are handled after they die in New York City is not the only insult the poor face,” proclaims a statement on their website, “but it's the final insult.”
Yet a woman who grew up on the island, where her father was prison superintendent, disagrees.
“My heart will be there forever,” wrote Judy from Virginia in an online forum for New York immigrants. “The poor and the homeless have the one thing that I want the most and can't have: a beautiful place to rest in peace.”
Historically speaking, New York's wealthy beg to differ. Edwin G. Burrows, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gotham: A History of New York to 1898,” recalls the advent of swish alternatives like Brooklyn’s private Greenwood Cemetery.
“The original idea was to create a place where the well-to-do could rest in peace without having to rub elbows, as it were, with the riff-raff,” he says.
Unable to avoid such ignominious elbow rubbing were acclaimed novelist Dawn Powell, who found her corporeal self in Hart Island turf after consigning her body to science and dying of colon cancer in 1965, and Academy Award-winning actor Bobby Driscoll, found dead at age 31 from a drug overdose in his East Side tenement in 1968.
But if friends and family were scandalized, perhaps the living place too much emphasis on the final resting place.
On the possibility of being buried at Hart, Burrows is curt: “I would feel no different than I would buried anywhere else — dead."
Source: http://www.thenaught...d-Dead-483.html
The pictures of the baby coffins and names ledger got to me. How can a baby not be claimed or cared about like that? :(
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