The open graves where New York buries its unclaimed bodies

2016-05-23T14:09:00-04:00

Twice a week or so, loaded with bodies boxed in pine, a New York City morgue truck passes through a tall chain-link gate and onto a ferry that has no paying passengers. Its destination is Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, where overgrown 19th-century ruins give way to mass graves gouged out by bulldozers and the only pallbearers are jail inmates paid 50 cents an hour. There, divergent life stories come to the same anonymous end.

"New York is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates. Buried by the score in wide, deep pits, the Hart Island dead seem to vanish — and so does any explanation for how they came to be there."

Be forewarned: it's a pretty grim read. Unclaimed bodies tend to have tragic backstories, providing a portrait of a city that provides few resources to its most vulnerable inhabitants: the mentally ill, homeless, elderly, and impoverished.

"In the face of an end-of-life industry that can drain the resources of the most prudent, these people are especially vulnerable," writes author Nina Bernstein.

For more on spaces devoted to the deceased, check out these links:

Archinect - News

The open graves where New York buries its unclaimed bodies