Hart Island, sometimes referred to as Hart’s Island, is located at the western end of Long Island Sound, in the Bronx Bourough of New York City. It measures almost a mile and is used as New York City’s Potter Field gravesite.
The remains of more than one million people are buried on Hart Island. Since the start of the 21st century, there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year. Burials on Hart Island include individuals who were not claimed by their families or did not have private funerals; the homeless and the indigent; and mass burials of disease victims.
Access to the island is restricted by the Department of Correction, which operates an infrequent ferryboat service and imposes strict visitation quotas. Burials are conducted by inmates from the Rikers Island jail. The Hart Island Project, a public charity founded by visual artist Melinda Hunt, has tried to improve access to the island and make burial records more easily available. Prior to 2019, several laws to transfer jurisdiction to the Parks Department had been proposed to ease public access to Hart Island.
In the linked article Steinmetz says, “To me, I start wondering if the word is out: ‘Hey, keep people out of Hart Island, because it makes us look bad.’”
While Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration claimed this is an issue of protecting privacy there are several holes in that story. First, the persons buried on Hart Island are unclaimed by family or friends. Second, there are no open caskets. The journalists are simply recording the numbers and size of trenches to correlate to COVID19 data which indicates a pandemic much worse than publicly stated.
On Wednesday plain clothes officers with New York Police Department seized a drone being flown by award winning photojournalist George Steinmetz. Steinmetz has spent four decades shooting news for National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine.
Hart Island History
The island’s first public use was as a military training ground in 1864. It has also been a Union Civil War prison camp, psychiatric institution, a tuberculosis sanatorium, and its current day use as a potter’s field
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