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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat We Found at Hart Island, The Largest Mass Grave Site In the U.S.
http://gizmodo.com/what-we-found-at-hart-island-the-largest-mass-grave-in-1460171716
Its a place where few living New Yorkers have ever set foot, but nearly a million dead ones reside: Hart Island, the United States largest mass grave, which has been closed to the public for 35 years. It is difficult to visit and off-limits to photographers. But that may be about to change, as a debate roils over the citys treatment of the unclaimed dead. Never heard of Hart? Youre not aloneand thats part of the problem.
Hart Island is a thin, half-mile long blip of land at the yawning mouth of Long Island Sound, just across the water from City Island in the Bronx. Depending on who you ask, it was named either for its organ-like shape or for the deer (or hart) that thrived here after trekking across the frozen sound in the 18th century. Hart is dense with history; its been used as a prison for Confederate soldiers, a workhouse for the poor, a women's asylum, and a Nike missile base during the Cold War.
Its most important role has been to serve as whats known as a potters field, a common gravesite for the citys unknown dead. Some 900,000 New Yorkers (or adopted New Yorkers) are buried here; hauntingly, the majority are interred by prisoners from Rikers Island who earn 50 cents an hour digging gravesites and stacking simple wooden boxes in groups of 150 adults and 1,000 infants. These inmatesmost of them very young, serving out short sentencesare responsible for building the only memorials on Hart Island: Handmade crosses made of twigs and small offerings of fruit and candy left behind when a grave is finished.
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Its a place where few living New Yorkers have ever set foot, but nearly a million dead ones reside: Hart Island, the United States largest mass grave, which has been closed to the public for 35 years. It is difficult to visit and off-limits to photographers. But that may be about to change, as a debate roils over the citys treatment of the unclaimed dead. Never heard of Hart? Youre not aloneand thats part of the problem.
Hart Island is a thin, half-mile long blip of land at the yawning mouth of Long Island Sound, just across the water from City Island in the Bronx. Depending on who you ask, it was named either for its organ-like shape or for the deer (or hart) that thrived here after trekking across the frozen sound in the 18th century. Hart is dense with history; its been used as a prison for Confederate soldiers, a workhouse for the poor, a women's asylum, and a Nike missile base during the Cold War.
Its most important role has been to serve as whats known as a potters field, a common gravesite for the citys unknown dead. Some 900,000 New Yorkers (or adopted New Yorkers) are buried here; hauntingly, the majority are interred by prisoners from Rikers Island who earn 50 cents an hour digging gravesites and stacking simple wooden boxes in groups of 150 adults and 1,000 infants. These inmatesmost of them very young, serving out short sentencesare responsible for building the only memorials on Hart Island: Handmade crosses made of twigs and small offerings of fruit and candy left behind when a grave is finished.
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What We Found at Hart Island, The Largest Mass Grave Site In the U.S. (Original Post)
Cooley Hurd
Nov 2013
OP
LongTomH
(8,636 posts)1. God have mercy upon us!
d_r
(6,907 posts)2. wow look at these pictures
Link Speed
(650 posts)3. I've heard about this place
A few years back, I found myself in a bar in Bronx (I think it was Bronx, it was close to the World's Fair site) that was full of Riker's Island guards. Seriously, every one in that bar (except me and the 'tender) worked at Riker's.
Two of them had spent the day at Hart Island and the rest of them were giving them a pretty good ribbing about it.
It was one wild night - a half-crazy bartender, a guy with hair to his waist and a bunch of serious drinkers in prison-guard uniforms.
I wish I could find that bar again. Women who work in prisons are pretty uninhibited. Those women were, anyway.
Denis 11
(280 posts)4. you were in Astoria or Long Island City Queens.
Rikers is in the Bronx, but the bridge connects it to Queens.