NEWS

Families win access to Hart Island, NYC's potter's field

Peter D. Kramer
pkramer@lohud.com
  • New York City bought Hart Island in 1868%2C for %2475%2C000
  • Those buried on Hart Island are either unknown%2C unclaimed or indigent
  • Hart Island has also been a boys%27 penitentiary and a missile base
  • Muckraking journalist Jacob Riis photographed burials on Hart Island around 1890

For 24 years, Peekskill artist Melinda Hunt has spent her life documenting, charting and helping families gain access to Hart Island, where New York City has buried its anonymous and indigent dead since just after the Civil War.

Mass Grave for Infants on Hart Island

The 101-acre island off City Island in Long Island Sound holds America's largest mass grave, where an estimated 1 million plain, pine boxes hold the city's poor and unknown.

Access to the potter's field hasn't been easy.

"Lawyers tell me it's harder to get onto Hart Island than a maximum-security prison," Hunt says in her bright upstairs office and studio on South Division Street.

On July 8, access got easier, when the New York Civil Liberties Union settled a lawsuit with the city, granting survivors visits once a month to the gravesites of their family members. Until now, access — through the Department of Corrections, which still oversees burials by Riker's Island work crews — has been to a gazebo on the island, far from the actual gravesites.

This settlement changes that, said Christopher Dunn, the NYCLU's lead counsel on the case.

"This settlement should help bring closure to the parents, children, brothers, sisters and other family members of the generations of people who suffered the indignity of mass burial and then suffered the added insult of being forsaken by a city policy that barred family and friends from visiting," he said.

Families like Dr. Laurie Grant, a Valhalla obstetrician and gynecologist whose daughter was stillborn 22 years ago this week, on July 13, 1993, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. The baby was buried on Hart Island without Grant's knowledge or permission while she recovered from the difficult delivery, she says.

Current designated burial sites at Hart Island.

Grant has been trying for years to get onto Hart Island. Last March, she arranged a trip and showed up at the dock, only to have no one from the corrections department show up to take her over. She said she hopes to be among the first to visit Hart Island under the new settlement.

"This is a hard time of year for me" surrounding the anniversary, she said, but added: "It's your right to visit the cemetery."

The first visits will be July 19. While the details are still being worked out, Dunn predicted there would be two two-hour windows for up to 25 visitors each. (Family members wishing to schedule a visit can call the Department of Corrections at 718-546-0911.)

Artist Melinda Hunt at her Peekskill studio July 9, 2015. She has chronicled NYC's potter's field cemetery, Hart Island, in the Long Island Sound near City Island. A photograph behind her shows an open plot on the island.

Hunt has been helping families navigate the bureaucracy for years, suing to gain access for mothers to visit their babies' graves. She turned thousands of pages of city records into the award-winning Hart Island Project website (www.hartisland.net), where she charts burials since 1980 and helps family members document the lives that led to Hart Island.

"It's like Facebook for the dead," she said. "We give people a blank slate to remember their family member, to tell their story. There's a reverence to what they write when they gather their thoughts. Unlike Facebook, we don't have nasty people show up."

Hunt also wrote the book on Hart Island, a 1998 collaboration with photographer Joel Sternfeld ("Hart Island," Scalo). In it, she asked prisoners to reflect on the work detail that has them filling the vast plots that measure 20 feet by 70 feet by 6 feet. Those plots hold 165 adult coffins. Or 1,000 plain pine boxes holding the remains of babies.

Inmate Eddie Melendez wrote: "When I first came to Heart Island, it was just a job to me. But when I found out that my baby sister was beried here it hurt me. Because she didn't get a proper beirial. For I can pay my restpecks and now when I beiry a baby I think of my sister."

Hunt also made a 2006 documentary film ("Hart Island: An American Cemetery") and created a gallery work on the topic Westchester Community College in 2012.

Hunt sees last week's settlement as a milestone in her effort to help families, but just a step on her goal to have the city parks department take over Hart Island and turn it into a city park. There is a bill before the City Council to transfer the island from the Department of Corrections to the Parks Department, and Hunt is hoping it will get a hearing in September.

Artist Melinda Hunt at her Peekskill studio July 9, 2015. She has chronicled NYC's potter's field cemetery, Hart Island, in the Long Island Sound near City Island. This panel includes a photograph from the island and letters written by Riker’s Island inmates tasked with burying New York’s anonymous or indigent dead.

The 101-acre island could serve the same dual purpose as other city parks — Madison Park and Washington Square Park, among them — that were once cemeteries. Hart Island could become the nation's largest "green cemetery," where bodies are not embalmed and are buried in plain pine boxes, as they have been at Hart Island from the start, permitted to degrade and feed the soil. That effort would require an organized landscaping plan, something better suited to the Parks Department than the Corrections Department, Hunt said.

"I'd like to make it like Governors Island, where kids go on field trips," Hunt said.

For now, those trips are limited to family members, once a month, on a Department of Corrections ferry.