For more than 140 years, Hart Island, part of the Bronx, has served as Potter’s Field for New York, the city cemetery where the indigent, and others, are buried. Covering 101 acres in at the western end of Long Island Sound, the site is the final resting place for more than 800,000 souls and is the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world. New York City’s Department of Correction runs the island. Inmates from Rikers Island perform the work of clearing fields and burying the dead.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/89617-hart-island/


Hart Island first went into public use during the Civil War and was used at the end of the Civil War as a Confederate [internment] camp and many, many Confederate soldiers died of exposure and were buried on Hart Island and have subsequently been moved. But those were the first burials. And the city took it over in an effort to extend the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island as a boy’s workhouse. And part of the effort was to reform young men through hard work. And part of that hard work was burying the dead.

Interesting!

New York's Island of the Dead
new video old one sucked

Nice sized base of voters for the democrats

Interesting article. But for me, having grown up near the ocean, I really don't see the point in burying the dead in the ground. Generations of sailors were laid to rest in the ocean, and honestly, you decompose pretty readily, and go back to the sea (or earth).

Lately I've seen videos of WW2, and plenty of our guys got a ceremony and then were dropped into the ocean, and I have no problem with that. I'm not particularly attached to my family's physical remains, but I cherish their memory.

So for NYC, this potters field becomes a rare oasis of green space in an otherwise completely urban environment. NYC is still an island. I say, let them rest in the deep blue sea.

Yes.... its still there... im confused as to the purpose of this post?

Just history, I was watching a documentary about the Island, at one point they had a Insane Asylum on the Island