#320 Hart Island: The Loneliest Place in New York

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Few people are allowed to go onto Hart Island, the quiet, narrow island in the Long Island Sound, a lonely place in sight of the bustling community of City Island. For more than 150 years, Hart Island has been New York's potter's field, the burial site for more than one million people -- unclaimed bodies, stillborn babies, those who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s, and, in 2020, the location of burials of those who have died of COVID-19 coronavirus. Hart Island's appearance in the international press this past week has drawn attention to the severity of the pandemic in New York City, but it has also drawn attention to the island itself. By the early 19th century, this peaceful place -- most likely named for deer which may have called it home -- had already developed a violent reputation as a renegade site for boxing matches. During the Civil War, black Union troops trained here and later Confederate soldiers were imprisoned in refitted prison barracks. But in the late 1860s the city prepared the island for its eventual and longest lasting purpose. Today it is the world's largest potter's field. And thanks to groups like the Hart Island Project, New Yorkers may finally get a glimpse at this strange, forlorn place and the previously forgotten people buried here. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys Episode 320, Heart Island, the loneliest place in New York.
0:06.5	Hey, it's The Bowry Boys.
0:08.1	Hey!
0:09.3	Support for The Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:12.8	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:22.0	Hi there, welcome to The Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:25.3	And I'm Tom Myers.
0:26.8	And today we're tackling a subject that's both a bit mysterious and rather somber.
0:33.4	We're traveling to a place called Heart Island, the strange and lonely island located in the Bronx.
0:41.7	It's a bit strange because of the island's rather unusual history as we'll get to today.
0:48.6	And we're calling it lonely because today nobody lives on the island.
0:53.3	No living person, we should say, because it's the final resting place of about one million New Yorkers
1:00.6	who have been buried in its mass burial plots.
1:04.6	Yes, Heart Island is the site of New York's current pottersfield or public cemetery.
1:11.4	And just to repeat that unbelievable statistic that Tom just said,
1:15.8	around a million people have been buried on the island since the mid-19th century.
1:22.7	It's also been in the news lately as the island's public burials have been tragically increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
1:30.4	Yeah. And to be clear, when we say pottersfield, we mean that these burials are for the city's poorest residents,
1:38.8	whose families cannot afford a more traditional cemetery burial.
1:42.3	And they're also for those who are simply forgotten.
1:45.3	People who sometimes cannot even be identified by the city.
1:49.4	So when these people die and there's no money or there's no family to take on the responsibility of their burial,
	...

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