Hart Island, in the Bronx, is a place of contrasts. It’s a beautiful, flat expanse of land with copses of trees and a wind-swept shoreline. It is also the world’s largest publicly funded cemetery, containing more than a million bodies, including those of Civil War veterans, people whose identities are unknown, people unclaimed by their families or who could not have private funerals, the indigent and the unhoused, and victims of pandemics such as AIDS and COVID-19.
Located one mile off the coast of the Bronx’s City Island, and accessible only by boat, and only with Parks Department permission, New York City’s potter’s field is a place of isolation, but also of mass graves, simple pine boxes stacked one atop another and arranged in rows, in plots marked only with numbers on posts or stones; each plot contains betwen 150 and 200 bodies. These mass burials began in 1872.

Lest one mistake Hart Island for a nature sanctuary, the white plot markers stud the landscape in every direction.
To visit the island as a tourist (families and friends of the buried are granted special access), one must enter a lottery through the New York City Parks Department. According to a ranger I spoke to, hundreds of people enter each lottery, and thirty people receive spots. On the day I visited, about twelve people were gathered by the ferry dock, at the end of a City Island side street. “It’s good you have a black bag,” one woman remarked to another visitor. “She’s a cemetery enthusiast,” someone added, as if by way of explanation. After these first jabs at small talk, the mood of the group quickly grew solemn and contemplative. The chain-link fence was festooned with love locks, or death locks—or both.
As we waited for the ferry, the rangers clarified the misconception that most of the dead on Hart Island are unidentified; in fact, due to advances in forensics, dental records, and the prevalence of biometrics, only about ten people each year are buried with their identities unknown. Once a body is identified, attempts are made to contact the next of kin. If they are not reached within a “reasonable” amount of time, the body is considered unclaimed. If the family is reached, they may choose either to claim the body or release it for burial here, for a variety of personal and financial reasons. Hart Island’s cemetery may be the only feasible option for many families—or a temporary solution. Families can request a no-cost disinterment of their loved one’s remains at any time, and about thirty of these take place each year. Before 1977, there were no records of who occupied each gravesite; starting in 1978, records have been kept of each plot’s occupants, down to the layer and row.
As we boarded the ferry, we could see the scraggly treetops of the island limning the horizon under a cloud-scratched sky. In contrast to ornate cemetery gates, a generic Parks Department sign marked our arrival, and I considered that most people who come here arrive in pine boxes, and never see this view. Certainly, no one plans to be buried on Hart Island, nor can one request to be buried here. As a ranger explained, if you were really attached to a mass burial on the island, you could request that your family refuse to claim your body upon death.
The Parks Department has been running tours, led by the Urban Park Rangers, for about a year. In 2021, the island’s management was transferred from the Department of Correction to the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Social Services, jointly. We were asked not to take photos of active burials, out of respect for the dead. Though I did see bulldozers trundling past, and mounds of earth, I did not see any coffins being lowered into the ground that morning.
There is no electricity or running water on the island, only port-a-potties, and no functional buildings or structures. An interfaith chapel was under construction on the day we visited—the pings of hammers were one of the only sounds besides lapping waves and honking geese—but it was still mostly a frame silhoueted against the sky, surrounded by construction cones: like the island itself, it was at once open and closed.
I saw this suggestion of porous boundaries, of inclusion and exclusion again in the ruins of a stone wall that had once surrounded the island superintendent’s house: it had been left intact, but there were gaps where doors or gates might once have closed it off.
When the island was still managed by the the Department of Correction, inmates with low-level charges were sent here to perform the burials, with the idea of rehabilitation through time spent in nature and in contemplation. As they hoisted the caskets and shoveled dirt, it was hoped, the inmates might reflect on their own crimes and what different paths their own lives might take from those whose remains they were charged with interring. A wall was built on the east side of the island painted with the words “Prison: Keep Off” to remind would-be visitors that this was not a site of recreation. Only a crumbling portion of the wall remains today; the eagle-eyed rangers would not let us onto the beach to see the painted words.
Over the years, there have been many attempts at communities in this place of isolation. In the 1970s, a structure called Phoenix House was built by former addicts for court-ordered rehab, and these patients lived alongside the prisoners who arrived by boat each day to perform their labor. There were “sober festivals” for the rehab patients, at which famous bands, including the Velvet Underground, came to play. In the 1920s, a man purchased four acres as a “Coney Island” for African Americans, who often felt excluded from traditional theme parks; though he got fairly far along, his plan ultimately fizzled. In addition, at various points, the island has also been home to a prison camp, a psychiatric asylum, a tuberculosis hospital, a homeless shelter, a reformatory, and a missile storage site.

Plots at the southern end of the island are occupied almost exclusively by victims of the AIDS epidemic. During that time, many funeral homes refused to accept bodies infected with AIDS for embalming or burial services, and they were sent here. The AIDS graves are deeper than any others, also because of the unsubstantiated fear of contagion, an example of further isolation and marginalization in an already isolated place. Many of these dead were and are far from forgotten, however: the families often had no say in the decision, and sometimes were not even notified of the death of their loved one.
During COVID, similarly, the number of people buried on Hart Island nearly tripled. The cities’ morgues were overwhelmed, and as there was no time or space to separate bodies by cause of death, whether from COVID or another cause, or to wait for families to claim them, the dead were shipped here, either permanently or temporarily. Many have since been disinterred by family and given more favorable funerals. It’s estimated that there is enough space on Hart Island for another fifty years of mass graves.
The bodies buried here are not embalmed, and the pine coffins are intended to biodegrade quickly. These are green burials in the purest sense. The coffins and their contents will merge into the soil, effectively recycling the burial sites. This idea is obviously contoversial, and raises ontological questions: If a body becomes one with the earth, can that same earth then be used to contain another body, or is the space considered occupied and sacred in perpetuity? The recycling of graves stretches the conception of what it means to be isolated, unclaimed, unknown, or otherwise marginalized, and what happens when one’s remains merge with someone else’s into an organic community in the purest sense.
With a rattle, the ferry workers—the windbreakered Charons of Hart Island, who perform this task for the dead as well as the living—pull a series of chains to raise the ferry apron, and the island recedes, bare trees huddled against the open sky.
To visit Hart Island, you can enter a lottery for the occasional Urban Park Rangers tours here: https://www.nycgovparks.org/events/hart-island
1 thought on “SIGHT: Hart Island”
An enticing portrait of a remote corner of our city. Love the green aspect of the burials. Thanks!