From the shore of City Island, in the Bronx, you can see it across the water: a low strip of land with a few buildings on it, roughly a mile long. For most of its history, you could not go there. If you had a relative buried on that island and you wanted to visit, you were told to stand in a small gazebo, as far as you could get from the graves, and look out across a field you were not allowed to walk on.
The island is called Hart Island. It lies in Long Island Sound, and since 1869 it has been New York City's potter's field: the public cemetery for the people nobody claimed. An estimated one million people are buried there. It is the largest public cemetery in the United States.
The way it works is not the way most cemeteries work. Burials go into long trenches. The coffins are plain pine boxes, stacked three deep. A single trench holds roughly 150 to 165 adults, or around a thousand infants. Adult graves are marked with small white posts. About 1,500 bodies arrive each year.
The people in those trenches were unclaimed, or unidentified, or homeless, or simply had families who could not pay for a funeral. For many decades, a large share of them were stillborn babies, handed over by hospitals for burial because the families had been told there was nothing else to be done.
And for generations, the graves were dug by work crews from Rikers Island. Men in jail, taken by ferry to bury the city's dead, for a few cents an hour.
Melinda Hunt is a visual artist. In the 1990s she began trying to answer what should have been a simple question: who is buried on Hart Island, and where. She and the photographer Joel Sternfeld published a book, Hart Island, in 1998. She eventually founded the Hart Island Project, built a searchable database of the burials (more than sixty thousand names recorded since 1980), and spent years doing the unglamorous work of helping families find out what had happened to their people.
What those families often discovered was that a record existed and was unusable. A mother who had lost a baby decades earlier might be given a number that meant nothing to her, with no way to turn it into a place to stand. Hunt has argued, in court and out, that visiting a cemetery is a right, not a favour.
In July 2015, a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union was settled. Families gained monthly visits to the actual gravesites instead of a view from a gazebo. The Department of Correction was required to add burial plot numbers to its online database. Weekday gazebo visits were opened to the general public.
In 2021, jurisdiction over the island moved from the Department of Correction to the Parks Department. Hunt had been pushing for that transfer for years, pointing out that former potter's fields in other cities had become parks. Her phrase for what Hart Island could be is a green cemetery.
The detail worth sitting with is not the size of the island. It is the arithmetic. A million people are buried there, and for most of that history the city could not hand you a list you could read. Every burial was recorded. The ledgers existed. The numbers were assigned, three to a coffin, row by row, by men who were careful about it. And then the record sat in a system that the families of the dead could not get into.
Being recorded and being remembered are not the same thing. A record with no way to reach it is just a drawer.
The Rikers crews left their own mark on the place: straight rows, evenly spaced, maintained by hand. It is, in its way, a kind of care, given by people who had reason to understand what it means to be written off.
There is a version of this story that ends with a database and a ferry schedule. The better version ends with what Melinda Hunt kept saying: a grave with a name attached is a place where somebody can go. Take the name away and it is a field. That is the whole difference, and it took a lawsuit to get it.
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