June 6 2020 by Christopher Maag
Lengthy article..
New York’s Invisible Island of the Dead
''Getting to Hart Island has many steps. Clockwise from top left: prisoners and guards enter a restricted dock on City Island; they board a ferry; cross the western Long Island Sound; and travel via bus from the dock to the graves. Photos by Luke Rafferty.''
''Hart Island is a hard place to get to if you’re alive, but an easy place to get lost if you’re dead. Technically part of the Bronx, it sits on the westernmost edge of Long Island Sound, crowding the entrance to the East River. Between its abandoned prisons slowly sinking into the forest, its spools of razor wire, and the rise at its northern end called “Cemetery Hill,” the island does a terrific job of looking spooky''.
“Sometimes people wind up in city cemetery when they shouldn’t be there at all,” says Amy Koplow, executive director of the Hebrew Free Burial Association, which works to arrange burials for indigent Jews and keep them out of the potter’s field. “They’re not indigent. They’re not unknown. Sometimes they just slip through the system.”
''Melinda Hunt, an artist who has been fascinated with Hart Island since the early 1990s, and went on to publish a book and produce a
film about it. In 2011 she founded the
Hart Island Project, a charity that helps families around the world search for relatives who went missing in New York, and who may be buried in the potter’s field.''