NEW YORK — Morgue trucks, hauling boxes of pine, continue to arrive by ferry at Hart Island, a mass grave where the City has long had to bury its unclaimed dead.
The island was once a penal colony, and has been run since the 19th century by New York’s prison system, which used inmates as gravediggers and kept it off-limits until 2021, when the parks department took over.
Now, in a remarkable break with a decades-long policy of keeping burials on Hart Island and their hidden graves secret, the department is opening the most forbidden place in New York.
“For decades, Hart Island has been misunderstood and stigmatized,” said agency commissioner Sue Donoghue. “But today is a new day.”
The City still conducts about 1,100 burials a year on Hart Island, adding to the million bodies already buried in this 53-hectare stretch of Long Island Sound off the coast of the Bronx. But in the coming months, the dead will share the island with nature classes and guided tours under the department’s Weekend Adventures series, which will be led by urban park rangers.
Events will include canoeing, hiking, archery and fishing — programming designed to honor the dead and remove the stigma surrounding the island. An advocacy group for the Island has also developed an augmented reality and navigation tool that allows visitors to tour the island and search for burial records using a smartphone.
Later this year, parks officials hope to open the programs to a limited number of users under “managed visitation,” a pilot program aimed at answering the tricky question of how to open up access to an island that is home to unmarked mass graves.
Will a $70 million transformation to a place known as the Island of Lost Souls be enough to banish his aura of dread and lift his Dickensian melancholy?
The City’s Human Resources Administration, which took over operations and burial records, has cleared decades of brush. The Department of Design and Construction has demolished and removed 15 dilapidated buildings, leaving panoramic views.
Officials have no plans to convert the largest public cemetery in the US into a recreational space with playgrounds and picnic tables. There are no amenities like bathrooms.
“It will be a passive, scenic open space, not a place where people disembark and go just to have fun,” said Mitchel Loring, a park planner.
He imagined the island becoming a visitable cemetery. Its flat terrain is dotted with little white posts marking plots for the poor, the homeless, the destitute, and the stillborn. There are no names.
Parks officials initially hesitated to take control of the island due to its many challenges, including a lack of basic services and the presence of inmate gravedigger crews. But the inmates’ work ended during the pandemic in 2020, when deaths exceeded the morgue’s capacities. Gravedigger crews were replaced by contract workers.
It was a very late move in the opinion of Melinda Hunt, founder of the nonprofit Hart Island Project, who has criticized the use of criminal labor and blamed the City’s secrecy for furthering the stigma surrounding the island.
Hunt became interested in the island in 1990 while investigating what had happened to friends who died of AIDS. Since then, he has fought for greater access and awareness, helping hundreds of people visit grave sites.
Public access would be restricted on burial days, typically Thursdays and Fridays, as well as two days a month when the City conducts graveside visits for family members, he said.
By: COREY KILGANNON
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6667205, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-18 21:00:07
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