Is this where “the bodies are buried” ?
Erosion unearthing bones on New York's island of the dead
BY COLLEEN LONG
26 mins ago
NEW YORK (AP) — Storms and the tides are unearthing the long-hidden bones of Hart Island, creating eerie scenes of skulls, femurs and collarbones on this sliver of land where New York City's destitute dead have for 150 years been sent off to be unceremoniously buried and forgotten.
After photos of exposed bones began turning up in news reports, forensic anthropologists from the city medical examiner's office went out last week and collected 174 human bones that they carefully cataloged, including six skulls, six jawbones, 31 leg bones and 16 pelvises. Small red flags dotted spots along the rocky shoreline where some remains were found.
"When I hear about the erosion, I always think, 'Are the bones his? Could any of them be his?'" asked Carol DiMedio whose grandfather Luigi Roma was buried on the island after dying from tuberculosis in 1933.
Advocates for Hart Island say the bones are a jarring sign that it's long past time for improvements to be made. In addition to stepping up a $13.2 million federal project to repair erosion caused by 2012's Hurricane Sandy and other storms, they want the 101-acre island in the Long Island Sound to be turned into a park and historic site, even if it continues to be used as a burial ground for the city's poor and nameless dead.
"These are New Yorkers," City Council member Mark Levine said of the remains. "These are human beings who were largely marginalized and forgotten in life, they were people who died homeless or destitute, victims of contagious disease, the AIDS crisis. And we're victimizing them again in their final resting place."
As many as 1 million souls lie buried on Hart Island, purchased by the city in 1868 as land for a workhouse for wayward boys and a potter's field. Over the decades, it housed a Civil War prison, an asylum, a tuberculosis hospital, a jail and a missile base. All the while, New York continued ferrying bodies there that went unclaimed at the city morgue.
The island, managed by the city's Department of Correction for more than a century, has never been kept up like a traditional cemetery with manicured lawns or even headstones.
Prisoners dig the long trenches used to bury the dead. Adults go into the ground in pine boxes, stacked on top of one another. Babies are placed in shoebox-sized containers. Around 1,000 people are buried there each year.
The internments take place out of public view and access to the island is limited to trips, once per month, that must be reserved in advance. Only people with loved ones buried on the island are allowed to visit the graves . Others are restricted to a visitors' gazebo near the ferry dock.
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