What does the future hold for Hart Island?

A gray sky hung over the island as a ferry pulled up to the landing. Just ahead, a New York City Parks and Recreation Department sign welcomed visitors with two words: “Hart Island.” A group led by urban park rangers then began taking in the peaceful landscape of the 131-acre island off Throggs Neck in the Bronx that New York City designated as its official cemetery in 1869. More than 1 million people have been buried on the island, a potter’s field for New Yorkers who were indigent, or whose remains went unclaimed, when they died.

The group – including several journalists on this day back in early May – walked along rock-covered pathways dividing plots of mass graves underneath neatly kept lawns. Numbered white markers indicated where the dead were buried. The visitors passed a deflated Mother’s Day balloon and statues of angels and madonnas draped with rosaries. Crumbling buildings and structures that once stood on the island for decades had been razed except for a chapel shrouded in scaffolding. This is the experience visitors escorted by uniformed parks enforcement personnel have when they visit their loved ones buried on the sparsely wooded island, the rangers explained.

“Is it normally this quiet,” a reporter asked.

“Is it normally this quiet?” Urban Park Ranger Michael Whitten said. “It depends on the day. But it is peaceful out here. Being so far removed from the rest of the city, it does get very, very quiet. It’s easy to hear the wind blowing.”

The parks department, which has had jurisdiction of the island since 2019, is at a transition point to decide how to make the cemetery more inviting to visitors. The island is essentially a public park, with no facilities or utilities. A soon-to-be released conceptual plan will include how the department would address those needs with green infrastructure amenities and improve access to the island. Ultimately, the upgrades also will help in destigmatizing the island – changing the negative narrative that often is associated with a potter’s field.

“I think the more people you get out here, I think the more that helps to change that,” said Charles Handras, the Parks and Recreation Department supervisor in charge of Hart Island. “I’ve had so many people, whether it’s on the ranger tours or whether it’s through the grave visits, where the family and friends coming out here always tell me, ‘Wow, I’m so surprised.’”

The Department of Correction and its predecessors originally were in charge of the island and had incarcerated people carry out the burials, while the island had mostly been inaccessible to visitors prior to 2014. That ended when the City Council voted to transfer jurisdiction to the parks department, which began escorted visitations and tours in late 2021. The Department of Transportation helped by providing one of the Staten Island Ferry boats to bring visitors to the island. The city Office of Chief Medical Examiner and Human Resources Administration coordinated on burials, which are now performed by a contractor.

This alliance of city agencies is what sustains Hart Island along with support from The Hart Island Project, a nonprofit that created a database of recently buried New Yorkers. The project provides information on how to visit, research the names of the dead and even how New Yorkers can elect to be buried there. The project offers a “Traveling Cloud Museum,” a storytelling platform with burial information and a timeline that tracks how long a person has been buried on the island. It can be updated with stories, epitaphs, images, sound and video.

According to the project, Hart Island is the largest natural burial ground in the U.S. and the city’s only green cemetery. Each marker on the island represents about 150 people who are buried there. The markers have 25 rows of pine caskets, six stacked on top of each other per row. Whitten explained that, for the rangers, the work on the island has become a devotion to those who are interred there and their visitors.

“Out here on the island, we try to make sure that we’re as respectful to those people who are laid to rest as we are to their loved ones as well,” he told the group. “So when we’re out here, we try to share the history, we try to share a few of the facts that we can, and we try to answer as many of those questions as we can, because that’s an act of service for us to be out here and to be able to do that.”

Holding up a black and white photo, Whitten introduced the group to the story of Louisa Van Slyke – the 24-year-old who died at a charity hospital in 1869 and was the first person buried on Hart Island, marking its start as the city’s public cemetery. The island, most likely named after the English word for the deer that migrated over from the mainland, according to the rangers, just five years earlier was used as a Civil War training ground for Black Union soldiers and came into use as a public cemetery out of necessity. The city’s population was growing as it expanded across what would become the five boroughs. Cemeteries began popping up, but it was clear that the city would need one specifically for New Yorkers who were indigent and especially since mortality rates were higher back then due to illness and disease. The city also needed a burial ground for New Yorkers whose identities were unknown.

“When these burials were first happening in the mid-1800s, you had a lot of people being buried who might have been new immigrants to the city. Their family members might not have known what happened to them. They might not have lived in the city,” another urban park ranger, Fi Whalen, told the group.

Hart Island has also served other purposes throughout its history. Like other islands in the rivers flowing through the city, it once had sanitariums for people with tuberculosis and psychiatric disorders. Hart Island also had a Civil War prison camp and in more modern times a Nike Ajax missile silo leftover from the Cold War. It even had a drug rehab that hosted an annual festival on the island.

Now, solely a cemetery, its burials reflect the history of New York as well. As a result of the AIDS epidemic, the island is believed to be the largest resting place for people who died from AIDS complications, according to the rangers. Military veterans also have been buried on the island. The history of the island is another reason for why the parks department is pushing for a conceptual plan.

It will outline a 20-year vision for the future of the island, describing capital improvements that will cover access, the visitor experience and efforts to support and protect the natural ecology, including preparing for climate change, according to Laura Melendez, a parks project planner. The plan also will make accommodations for the contractor that conducts the burials.

Discussions on what to do with the island began in 2024, with input from the public as well as various city agencies, and a final plan is expected in the coming weeks, according to a parks department spokesperson.

“A lot of the common themes we heard from community members was that they wanted this island to continue to be contemplative, peaceful, really to honor those who are buried here, while at the same time offering amenities such as restrooms, seating, things like that to make it a little bit more comfortable and more welcoming to the families who come visit their (loved ones),” Melendez said. Funding will be determined once the plan is published on the Hart Island website. “As we continue to fundraise and advocate to our elected officials, we’ll hopefully get all the projects implemented as we go,” Melendez said.

For now, Handras, the island’s supervisor, relies on a “coalition effort” among city agencies with the funding provided to maintain the cemetery.

“I would love to do more,” he said, as the group stepped back on to the ferry to return to the mainland. “Hopefully the City Council and some of the stakeholders – and just general New Yorkers – hopefully, they would like to see more done out here.”