Many people have been shocked in recent weeks to see drone footage of bodies of people who had allegedly died of COVID-19 being stacked in pits on New York City’s Hart Island. Yet Hart Island, America’s largest mass grave, has long been New York’s dark shadow: a place where the unclaimed, the dispossessed and the poor are laid away and forgotten, all in sight of some of the most expensive real estate and some of the wealthiest people on earth. Hart Island is where the Other is buried.
Being one of the most populous places on earth, Manhattan has a longstanding problem of what to do with its unclaimed dead. Its solution is Hart Island, whose original Siwanoy inhabitants had long ago been eradicated. Hart Island is the ideal location to place Othered groups: just West of Long Island Sound in the area of the Bronx, it is near enough to be a convenient storage location but out of the way enough to be invisible to most New Yorkers. Estimates put 1 million bodies on an island that is approximately 1 mile long by 0.33 miles wide. Coffins of children, women, and men are stacked in rows on top of each other. They have for years been buried by Riker’s Island prisoners, disproportionately black, who have reported feeling traumatised by the work. Such trauma is unsurprising, especially since, as I saw while looking through records in New York’s Municipal Archives, a significant number of burials are of unidentified body parts, unceremoniously placed in boxes marked ‘limbs’.
Hart Island was a dumping ground for those whom New York City wished to forget.
Before becoming a mass grave, Hart Island was used as a training ground for black Union troops in 1864, presumably because holding African-American soldiers in New York City, which had recently undergone a series of race riots, was considered too dangerous: placing them on Hart Island kept them out of sight of New York’s racist white population. The City bought the island shortly after the war and began performing burials of the poor and unclaimed. Being buried in what became known as Hart Island’s Potter’s Field was a stigma suffered by the ‘pauper dead’, including ‘the children of the poor, of the vicious, of the vile’, as an 1878 New York Times article put it. The island had several other uses in the late nineteenth-century: a quarantine station for victims of Yellow Fever, an Industrial School for pauper children, and a women’s psychiatric institution. By the early twentieth century the island housed a workhouse and a prison for the elderly. Hart Island was a dumping ground for those whom New York City wished to forget.
